Satellites are only visible shortly after sunset and before sunrise, known as astronomical twilight.
If the images in the photograph upset you and you think our night sky is ruined, the thing that kills it the most is light pollution. Flood lights, parking lights, and street lights that don’t direct light down to the ground make viewing much worse than satellites for everybody.
It’s just as easy to capture incredible images of the night sky, even during astronomical twilight, with image processing. Here’s photos I’ve captured in my driveway in the SF Bay Area: https://bradgessler.github.io/observatory-blog/observations/
I captured said images with an Elixir software stack I installed on a Pi and hooked up to my telescope. It’s open-source at https://github.com/bradgessler/observatory for those who are interested. I hook Claude up to it and it runs observations for the night, processes images with deterministic tools, and publishes them as the night progresses.
[–] happytoexplain 3 days ago
[–] wtch98 3 days ago
One of my most memorable night viewings was some years ago when I was in Cyprus, lovely and warm, sat looking overhead. I saw a bright light and a dark light perhaps 2 or 3 degrees (more than a thumb, less than 3 fingers) apart travelling at the same speed. I later found out it was a Dragon carbon ship detatched from the space station and on its way back to splashdown less than an hour later in the pacific.
[–] anon7000 2 days ago
You have to wait a couple hours after sunset for the really good stargazing to begin…
Yes, terrestrial light pollution has been the number one problem since we invented electric lights, but satellites and terrestrial light pollution are both separate problems with different effects and different coverage. E.g. even though light pollution is much more harmful, you can escape it with a short drive, even if you live in a densely populated region. You can't escape the strings of satellites.
Separately: "Shortly after sunset" is a downplay. It can be hours. But in any case, it's the time when the vast majority of stargazers are looking at the stars (with their eyes).
Satellites have the same awkward sociopolitical energy infecting them as all tech does nowadays. But remember: There is absolutely nothing wrong with being upset about the effect of these satellites, just like there is absolutely nothing wrong with being upset about the effect of electric lights. You can certainly get a lot of mileage out of weighing this against the consequences of having much fewer satellites, and that's exactly where all the argument should be occupied. That they affect the night sky, which reasonably annoys many people, is just a fact.