ABC feature on orbital crowding affecting our view

[glend]

This animation popped up on my ABC feed today. Viewed from space it looks pretty shocking, with more to come. Not good for us astronomy folks.

Give the link time to start up the animation, and scroll down to see more of the story.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-01/sacrificing-the-stars-for-satellites-better-phone-coverage/102208436

[Finbar]

It's a coronavirus!

[glend]

It might be necessary to buy time on Lunar based observatories, if you want clean astro images in the future. Or subscription based deep space telescopes, maybe Elon could put a few up as compensation for his role in creating the low Earth orbit mess.

[strongmanmike]

A really disappointing trajectory...sadly, it feels like the horse has bolted :sadeyes:

Mike

[Paul Haese]

Hmm yes!!!

A recent image I produced indicated how the satellite issue has changed over the last 10 years. Images 10 years ago might have had 10 or so frames from 100 that would have satellite trails. Usually those would be seen near sunset or sunrise. Recently stacking 4 stacks of 85 frames each I found that nearly 85% of those frames had one or more satellite trails in them. Most were faint but there were a significant proportion that were bright.

Now, data rejection will currently rid the individual frames of the trails as none of these trails lay on top of each other and so other frames make up for the area rejected. Lots of frames means the problem goes away.

However, this is with around 8000-9000 satellites in orbit. Once it gets to 100K I am not sure how things will work. I think though it will mean imaging will need to be done over longer durations, therefore I would be expecting to go from around 20 hours of integration on average for images to 50 hours on average. That might not suit most in the imaging game. Perhaps that might be good for remote hosting facilities, but it might drive a lot of setup each night imagers out of the hobby. That will be bad for the imaging industry I imagine.

Given that no one who makes the approvals to launch satellites really thinks this is a major problem or could become a major problem, I expect that the vain will happily have an internet connection anywhere on the earth so they can post selfies in remote locations. That is until a rather large piece of rock crashes into the Earth which might have been detected had there not been 100K worth of satellites blocking the view. Then something might be done about it. That really is the story of human reaction to problems. Try to fix it after the fact.

[strongmanmike]

And that's just the problem from the relatively narrow, all be it also important, perspective of astroimaging, the even more worrying ramification Paul, is covered in Dr Cheung's comments in the piece:

“Any error, any collision between satellites will cause what is called Kessler syndrome, which is that you have a runaway of space debris that will endanger other satellites,” he says.

“You don’t want to have the situation where people are just sending satellites up there without any coordination, without any consideration for others or for the public good.

“Because in the end, what will happen is that we pollute space for the benefit of no-one.”

The parallels with the rising CO2 emissions problem, is pretty strong...

Mike

[glend]

Paul, I can say that so far, my EAA activities have not been affected by the swarm. I put this down to Sharpcap's video frame alignment and stacking algorithm; where brief pixel flashes are seemingly discarded.
It may a refuge for some imagers, who cannot afford the increasing time investment, and ruined subs, of traditional long form imaging. Of course EAA comes with a reduced quality of output, but it keeps people involved.

[strongmanmike]

Ok, I give up, what's EAA Glen? :)

Mike

[Paul Haese]

Yes I did neglect to consider a Kessler cascade event. Though in reality I think it would cascade dramatically to the point where thousands of collision events would occur from one single event and wipe out near earth usage for quite some time.

I know when visiting the Australian Space Agency last year we were told that they are performing up to 700 odd "adjustments" per week already to avoid collisions. Times that by massive density constellations and we will have total chaos. Hopefully AI will help to avoid such incidences but could AI keep up or more importantly will it decide not to do so?

[glend]

Electronic Assisted Astronomy. Uses a high frame rate camera and software like Sharpcap . Sharpcap takes individual frames and aligns and stacks them to build an image progressively in real time. It does not need cooled cameras, although they can be used, and very accurate guiding is not necessary, as the frames are short.. As the frames are stacked wonderful images appear, on your screen. You can let it run as long as you like, increasing detail. Used extensively in planetary imaging, sometimes called Lucky Imaging.
Works well for DSOs, just acquire bigger stack. And no post acquisition processing is required.

Big topic on Cloudy Nights Forum (See EAA there).

https://www.cloudynights.com/forum/73-electronically-assisted-astronomy-no-post-processing/

[strongmanmike]

Ah ok, cheers for that, hm? never heard it referred to as that before, I had heard of lucky imaging though, so thanks for the enlightenment :thumbsup:

Mike