Saw the long line of Starlink Satellites last night...

[wcmagumba]

I am located in South Central Kansas near Wichita and about 10:00 pm last night (Friday) I saw these abominations. They followed a straight line out of the Northwest for about 2 minutes. As an amateur astronomer (I don't do astro photography for which these things are even worse, leaving streaks in photo images) the Musk alien invasion will definitely affect my observation and enjoyment of the night sky. There are thousands and thousands more to be launched and several other companies are planning similar launches. Great for internet access maybe (likely won't be low cost as touted and not work as well as touted either) but will make billionaires more billions...whoopee. Even with the modifications planned by Musk engineers to reduce reflectivity (doesn't really work well) the swarm of micro satellites will affect us all by compromising research by major earth based astronomical platforms. They were hauntingly pretty to watch, like a chain of pearls across the sky but knowing the increasing negative effects on scientific research, both professional level and amateur level I am fairly well disgusted. Rant over....


https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacexs-dark-satellites-are-still-too-bright-for-astronomers

https://astronomy.com/news/2020/11/spacexs-starlink-satellites-are-about-to-ruin-stargazing-for-everyone

[MuseRider]

1. I am up in NE Kansas

and have not really looked for them. It will be stormy tonight but I will start looking out of sheer disgust and curiosity. I agree with you. I too am disgusted. I am grateful I lived long enough to know the sky before all the light pollution got so bad. Out here on the farm we have lost most of the dark sky with the incursion of a massive Walmart distribution center that is not even done yet, a huge truck park for them and for the Target distribution center and the Home Depot distribution center and the disgusting and stinky Frito Lay plant and only a little less disgusting Mars plant. The big race track us a different deal but all but one of those have been built since I bought this farm and most since we built our house out here. It is so sad that money is allowed to reduce the beauty of our sky and losing the ability to see constellations is just unthinkable. My rant is now over too. Nothing to be done I guess but rant about it now and again.

Be aware tonight, it looks a little iffy out here.

[pdxflyboy]

2. My wife and I saw them

About one year ago up here in Portland, OR. For the first few minutes we were speechless with the hairs on the back of our necks tingling. We thought it was a REAL alien invasion.

[Rver]

3. last night was the 3rd

night that we've seen them here in Nevada 50 miles north of Tonopah. Two nights ago 3 different trains. The unpolluted sky made them really stand out.
Last year we watched comet neowise from the same place.
The satellites will destroy astrophotography though.

[wcmagumba]

4. They were about the same direction as Neowise from here in KS...

I really enjoyed that comet for several days and brought out some neighbors to check it out (mostly senior RW people who had never looked at or considered the night sky, pretty fun to explain a few things to them...likewise with the Jupiter and Saturn planetary conjunction last Dec,,,whut, planets? and Mars too!)

[CloudWatcher]

5. We're living in the "golden age" of low-Earth orbit Sats

I'd wager that before too many more years the low-Earth orbit environment will be so polluted that it will be basically unusable. We're being extremely careless ... yet again assuming that a new environment is so vast we don't have to worry about such things.

But before then ... the cost of launching is dropping rapidly enough that companies will just assume some small percentage of their payloads will get smashed to bits before their natural end-of-life. So they'll launch even more. And then it will just get worse faster. So the average lifetime will decrease rather rapidly I think. And humans bound for orbit will have a hard time getting life insurance.

And that's not even factoring the odds of some idiot country taking pot-shots at some of the bigger sats. I can think of a couple that would love to get credit for taking out all the GPS and NRO sats.