Starlink

Just seen Elon Musk’s Starlink birds.

Wow.

I mean, it’s always been known that you can catch a satellite or the ISS by looking in the right place at the right time, but these things are basically waving flags and shouting “U-S-frickin’-A” in technicolor.
Seriously, they are about as conspicuous as looking down over a motorway at night.

It’s a slow moving line of bright dots (less than Venus, less than Sirius, about the same as Rigel). Today they came WSW heading towards ENE. There are currently about 60 of them. The plan is to have 12,000 of the things up there (in context, there are about 1500 active orbiting objects and some other bits of junk large enough to be seen). Plans are, God help us, to have around 30,000 of them at the end of deployment.

FFS.

To quote from from the diary of Captain Presence922, Starglider Forerunner11, mission from TS380768VX41a to TS380922ST6:

A good thing we weren’t planning on a slingshot round TS380922ST6c itself. Never seen so much technojunk in orbit round a planet!

To help out it into context, here’s a photo I took:

Original: https://i.imgur.com/VE824M7.jpg

The bright blob behind the trees is Venus. The stars are of the constellation Aquarius…but I can’t name any as Google Sky doesn’t think they’re important enough to caption, which means the stars will have numbers and weird Greek symbols instead of cool names like Betelgeuse, Procyon, and Achernar (which sound like the sorts of names that might turn up in a Game Of Thrones clone (not that I’ve ever watched GOT)).

The reddish line at the top is a Boeing Dreamliner flying from Paris CDG to Bogota.

And the Starlinks? Really obvious. The line of them stretched easily halfway across the sky.

Eight second exposure, ISO 500, F1.5, taken with a Samsung S9 mounted on a tripod and a two second (anti shake) delay.
I’d like to have made a short video too, but the camera isn’t that sensitive in video mode. No luxuries like long exposure, it’s a flat 30fps (or less in one of the fancy modes).

Oh, I understood the context all right. I’ve not seen them yet, but I’m familiar with seeing the odd satellite progressing steadily across the sky, having spent evenings lying on a khati outside my in-laws’ house in central India, where there’s no light pollution within fifty miles and it’s often warm enough, and can easily imagine these horrible annoyances. Litter…

No wonder astronomers think Starlink will be the bane of ground based observatories.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-fccs-approval-of-spacexs-starlink-mega-constellation-may-have-been-unlawful/

I like the idea that the FCC thinks it has the rights to bugger up the world’s sky.

Let’s put it to a unanimous verdict of the G20 members. If they all agree, then go for it…

Oh my. Skip to 6 minutes for the “WTF!” part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU

Error correction: There are 120 in orbit, not 60. The recent launch that put up 60 of them was… the second one.

Looks like the Starlinks (that aren’t over the US in a sort-of-vertical pattern) are passing over the lower half of the UK this evening (looking at the report on my “Satellite” app), but it’s an hour later than I looked so will they be as visible? Hmmm…

Bugger all visible in the sky here in Greenock this evening. Cloudy.

Some people saw it: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mystery-train-lights-spotted-moving-21317401