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About LinkBacksRead more.4th July filing to the FCC outlines plans to use satellites to deliver broadband to millions.
Read more.4th July filing to the FCC outlines plans to use satellites to deliver broadband to millions.
hmmm thought elon musk was going to do that too, via spacex called starlink
Originally Posted by hellig
he isThe FCC already has 13,000 low-Earth orbit satellite approvals under its belt (nearly 12,000 of which are for Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp).
Hmm, satellites already get in the way of my telescoping activities as it is. We're talking about an existing 1000 or so in low orbit (which you can already see frequently at a dark sky observatory - spend a couple of hours there and you'll see a handful easily without going looking) going to ~15,000. As if light pollution wasn't enough.
Grump grump.
It's no grump, perfectly valid.
AFAIK the Astronomy world is concerned it'll bugger up optical and near infrared observations, let alone what it'll do to radio wave detection and just, you know, just looking up at the stars.
I know Musk says all astronomy will go offworld but it"s not yet.
Grab that. Get that. Check it out. Bring that here. Grab anything useful. Take anything good.
Kessler Syndrome is one suggested solution that the Fermi Paradox.... Just saying...
I'm not overly concerned about telescoping activities - if you're doing visual astronomy any satellites will move out of the field of view very quickly, and shouldn't be bright enough to affect your dark adaptation. For astrophotography it's a bit more of a concern, but the usual processing and calibration frames should deal pretty effectively with satellite trails; I don't currently ditch subframes with satellite trails assuming the frame is otherwise ok. Now planes on the other hand... they make a right mess of things and having a 5+ minute exposure ruined is a bit galling.
These proposed satellite networks are in a low orbit and without station keeping their orbits decay fairly quickly due to atmospheric drag. SpaceX have lowered the orbit for some Starlink satellites and in theory any malfunctioning satellites that can no longer be properly de-orbited will burn up within 5 years.
I'm hoping to upgrade my telescope with a tracker and do some long exposure astrophotography. To be honest this has made me rethink. The observatory I usually visit has just built a great big new astrophotography bit and the stuff that has come out of it is insane. I'm going there next week actually so I might ask what they think. I suspect they'll be suitably unimpressed.
EDIT: Also, Mr Musk may have the money to send up his own telescope but if you talk to people in the business they usually got into it as a kid with back garden kit and that inspired them. Or they went to an observatory and saw what they were churning out. If you cover the planet in little satellites and make home / ground based astronomy really limited, you're going to vastly reduce the number of people going into the field.
Last edited by philehidiot; 09-07-2019 at 11:57 AM. Reason: More ranting.
It does depend on what sort of astrophotography you're trying to achieve - if you're doing a single longish exposure, e.g. landscape under the milky way then a satellite trail could ruin it. Or a straight line across a photo of star trails.
For tracked deep-sky AP then typically you take multiple exposures (sub-frames), align them to correct any tracking errors/rotation and then average them to reduce the effects of noise/atmospheric distortion/telescope vibration etc. With the right software there are algorithms that can reject outlier pixels, so if the pixel at a set X,Y coordinate was some shade of dark grey in most of your subframes, but very light due to satellite pass in one of them, it can reject the satellite-affected pixel and average the remaining ones.
https://pixinsight.com/doc/tools/Ima...escription_003
So if you're planning to upgrade and get into AP, no need to rethink!
Aye I was considering deep sky stuff but hadn't looked into it beyond knowing what kit I need and the cost of that. I didn't consider the software behind putting the pics togther and really just was thinking you just set the camera to a long exposure and that's that. Sounds like once I've been made poor with other things, I need to do a lot of reading into how this is gonna work. To be frank, this whole wedding business has taken up a lot of time and once it's out of the way I'll have far more time to actually consider things properly...
At the moment my money is going elsewhere so any astrophotography stuff is gonna have to wait.
The software doesn't have to be expensive thankfully. You can stack the frames using Deep Sky Stacker (free), and it supports various algorithms which will deal with satellite trails. It spits out a .tiff which you can then process using Gimp etc.
As for camera control, there are free solutions but I'm a fan of BackyardEOS (Or BackyardNikon for D5x00 and up cameras), which isn't free but isn't terribly expensive.
The hardware is what's really going to lighten your wallet!
There are really a lot of satellites in space. Many of them were launched a long time ago and no longer work.
I understand your grumbling. but still, many of them give people the opportunity to communicate with people who are important to them. Not everyone has cable internet. In addition to large and advertised players, many new private projects are now appearing in this field. Like Skyrora in England, for example.
So your grumbling will only get worse over time)
It doesn't mean his "grumbling" isn't valid though. The problem is infrastructure, lay decent fibre networks and charge sensible amounts and it would avoid a lot of this issue in the US - where they are stymied by stupid laws preventing competition SFAIK so the service is abysmal and this is the way to circumvent that. When you look at places like Africa however Satelites is probably the best way of getting them up and running, and keeps the tech out of the hands of corrupt regimes.
Will these be geostationary or orbital?
Yes, you are right. That you need the right infrastructure. And the grumbler is right that there is too much rubbish. I think it is worth now developing effective mechanisms for cleaning outdated equipment and space debris. But, as far as I know, these developments have also been underway for several years. So far, it seems to me that "space cleaning" is a more difficult task than actually launching everything that is needed and not needed into orbit or open space.
So far, I have not heard anything about the reduction in the cost of geostationary satellites, but I think that soon we will find out something about this. There are a lot of smart people on the planet) And influential ones too. And there are enough of those who want to benefit society. If only they united more often ...
Given how "green" a lot of companies are pretending to be these days there should be some sort of recycling effort in place in space, perhaps all satellites, rather then deorbiting, should all meet somewhere between here and the moon, then they can go to the moon and be recycled into a moon base or stuff to go to Mars rather than burning up and being wasted..
Yes, many companies only pretend to be green, unfortunately. Mainly to gain public approval. And this applies not only to space companies. But still, I recently read the discussions and people absolutely rightly say that rocket launches leave much less carbon footprint than intercontinental aircraft. So much less that it is less of a statistical error. The garbage problem still remains. But I think when all the views of society are turned in this direction (thanks to the extensive advertising campaigns of some) I think this problem will begin to be solved very quickly. I wonder in what way
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