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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   1651 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 30, 2024

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Haven't seen them myself IRL, but I saw them in the documentary Wild Wild Space. I can imagine I'll get a feeling of "the future is now" when I see them myself. Sounds a bit inspiring. A feeling of possibilities. Until there's way too many and the beautiful empty sky is more of a congested mess, heh. But why are they visible? I don't think I've heard of visible satellites before Starlink.

I don't do as much stargazing as I'd like to, but even before Starlink I caught satellite streaks on long-duration telescope photos, and saw dots that looked too fast+smooth to be planes only to discover they were satellites, both fairly frequently.

Starlink is what gets all the attention for two reasons:

  1. They're very close to us, and brightness decreases with distance squared. They start out really bright (peak apparent magnitude 2.6 - the planets and the brightest hundredish stars are brighter but that's about it) and bunched up in "trains" of a couple dozen at a time, and they don't get separated or get dimmer (mag 5 for the first batch, dimmed to 6.3 for the first "visorsat" designs, brightened to 5.6 for the "v2 mini" design) until they've all spread out (under slow ion drives) and raised their orbits to their final altitude. (larger magnitude numbers are dimmer, and mag 6 is about the limit of what can be seen with the naked eye in a dark sky)

  2. They're very numerous. About a hundred countries have put satellites in orbit, two of them have put at least a thousand in orbit ... and yet if you add up all the non-SpaceX satellites put together, SpaceX has more now. Like 50% more if you only count active satellites. It's something like 6000 right now. They literally launched 42 more with two rockets this morning. They're a bit preoccupied with a manned mission at the moment, so they probably won't be launching a couple dozen more until (checks calendar) Wednesday.

They're in a very low orbit, and get much less visible once there's not a giant row of them.
I sometimes lay down staring at the sky, and even with the light pollution being much worse now it's amazing the things you start seeing. Dim stars, thousands of meteors, satellites.

I don't think I've heard of visible satellites before Starlink

There are hundred of visible satellites apparently, though before seeing Starlink I had only ever seen one at a time.

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