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My quiet obsession with satellites — and how they're ruining everything
From ruined photos to vanishing darkness, satellites are transforming the night sky — and not always for the better.
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Did you ever see an Iridium flare? For two decades until 2019, these communication satellites would become dazzlingly bright for a second or so in the night sky. I used to see them by accident before discovering that some websites and apps could forecast precisely when and where they would occur. I got so obsessed with Iridium flares that I would build my stargazing sessions around them. Eventually, I started trying to take night sky images just as they flared. Why? In a long exposure, the flare produced a diamond-shaped light. It was beautiful. I carried on doing the same for the International Space Station (ISS), capturing it racing across the night sky, again to a tight pre-determined schedule.
Then SpaceX came along. After launching the non-flaring replacements for Iridium in May 2019, SpaceX began launching its Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit. There were complaints about their brightness from astrophotographers, who saw their streaks in long exposure photos, but for stargazers, they were initially a delight. Each time SpaceX launched a batch of satellites into orbit on a Falcon 9 rocket, a string of moving lights could be seen in the night sky. It got called a "train" by some because it resembled a freight train racing through the sky. To me, it looked like an alien invasion. During COVID-19, glimpsing Starlink trains was something new to do (I spent hours on Heavens Above). Now it's something to actively avoid.
About 11,000 Starlinks later, that seems naive. Sure, there are now 12 million people worldwide who use Starlink internet access. I hope most of them are in previously off-grid communities in Africa, which was said to be one of Starlink's major selling points.
Look up soon after sunset, and Starlinks and other satellites are everywhere. As primarily a naked-eye stargazer and binocular astronomer, it doesn't particularly bother me, but for astrophotographers and both visual and radio astronomers, the mega-constellation era is a tragedy. Being photobombed by satellite streaks in images is a big problem, but so is radio interference in low Earth orbit. Astrophotographers can stack images and use software to remove trails (as if post-processing wasn't already time-consuming enough), but for astronomers, mega-constellations can hugely affect spectroscopic data and wide-field surveys, such as the Rubin Observatory.
Within a few years, there's likely to be about 40,000 Starlinks, but with Amazon and other companies preparing rival mega-constellations, a phase of hyper-expansion is about to begin. It's going to get a lot, lot worse. As with Iridium satellites, mega-constellations of satellites will eventually de-orbit, burn up and disappear from the night sky, though probably not en masse in our lifetimes.
The best time to fully appreciate just how dominant satellites are becoming in the night sky is during summer in the twilight hour immediately following sunset or before sunrise. At this time of year, the sun may have dipped below your horizon, but it's not far below, so its light still shines on satellites far above you.
By the middle of the night, the sun is farther below the horizon. Satellites therefore pass through Earth's deep shadow and don't get lit by the sun, making them more or less invisible.
Here comes a beautiful week for being outside looking west as twilight unfolds after sunset. That's because the moon reaches its new phase on Sunday, June 14, which means dark skies (albeit during short nights in the Northern Hemisphere's mid-latitudes) and a crescent moon after sunset. On June 15, you'll see a young waxing crescent with Venus, Jupiter and Mercury, with the latter as high as it gets. On June 17, the crescent passes close to Venus and the Beehive Cluster. These moments a