Starlink is increasingly interfering with astronomy, scientists say
Starlink is increasingly interfering with astronomy, scientists say
Astronomers have long criticized the satellites for being too bright, making it harder to see the universe.
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I started doing amateur astrophotography last year with a camera, lens and startracker.
The way it works is you take dozens or hundreds of photos of the same thing, then combine them into one final image, a process called "stacking".
To gather faint light, each photo is a long exposure gathering light for 30 - 120 seconds.
I have therefore taken over 20.000 long exposure shots of the night sky, pointing at different things, using wider and narrower lenses and NOT ONE SINGLE CLICK came without a Starlink streaking across the frame.
That’s fucking crazy, especially to think this wasn’t even a problem (on the same scale) more than 5 years ago.
It is crazy, and as I said in another comment this is going to be exponential. We will have many mega constellations like starlink in the next decade.
That's actually incredibly sad. Damn.
Yeah, sadly this has become normal. The polution rate has reached ~100%. And sure, you already artificially build the final image anyways, but with Starlink, this has become a necessity. You can no longer take any individual shots, as they're all just Starlink streaks.
What focal length do you normally shoot at? My rig is at 610mm and I get satellite trails mostly around dusk/dawn, but they all get rejected out during stacking
12/35mm for wide / nightscape shots, 135mm for regular wide field and 500mm for deep sky-ish stuff.
My sensor is APS-C, so the "effective" focal length is 1.5x the above lens values
Damn :(
I'm a nobody using my phone to take the occasional image stack using Google's "night sight" mode on my Pixel 7 Pro. Out of the 30 or so pictures I've taken, one has a Starlink Trail.
Not necessarily a "starlink trail" you took a photo of a satellite, could be starlink could be something else. Also the astrophotography mode on the pixels is purdy cool and fun to mess around with
I saw it with my eyes. It was without a doubt a string of 9 Starlink satellites. If you look closely, the image is a composite of multiple trails in a nearly colinear path.
Wow nice! If this was with the phone on a tripod or generally stationary that might be more than one trail, looks like 3 lines grouped up.
You can also see the Andromeda galaxy above it which is awesome for a phone!
Haha, that's not the best astro photo I've taken with my phone. It's not even in focus. 😅 Let me dig up another. And yes, I knew that was Andromeda. It's pretty cool that it captured it.
Here are the Northern Lights during the recent Perseid meteor shower with some stars.
Ironically, I couldn't really see the Northern Lights with my own eyes. It was foggy out, and they were very faint, but my phone's astro mode could see them. I even have videos, because the camera app always makes a 1 or 2 second video from the individual images while taking an stacked astro photo.
Here's one that shows the Milky Way pretty well.
What other objects interfered? The ISS i assume.
The ISS is visible from any single point you're standing on for up to about a minute when passing directly overhead and then the next orbit isn't close enough for you to see.
Some comm and weather sats here and there but really nothing crazy. It was even fun to have individual shots with a streak on it cause it was a relatively rare occasion.
Now there's just no hiding from it. Yes, the process of stacking images averages out the streaks in the final image, but for the average person with a wide lens taking a milky way shot during summer camping it's basically impossible to not have like 5 streaks on it.
Out of that 120 second long exposure:
- how long was a satellite visible?
- how many frames out of how many did it stay in place?
- was its movement similar to any natural phenomena you were capturing?
Certainly this is a problem and will only get worse, but it really seems like the room and gloom is excessive and it ought to be reasonable to filter out