Society for Popular Astronomy

The Astronomical Society of Edinburgh are hosting an event to discuss the impact of the mega satellite constellations on both professional & Amateur astronomy on the 15th June 2021 at 19:30 BST.

As you will know Starlink will have frequent satellites passing with a brightness of around mag 3.5 at your zenith. That is only slightly dimmer than the satellite chains you may have seen following launches. One of the reasons they will be brighter than previous forecasts is that they will be operating them in a lower orbit than originally planned to reduce the latency of the internet signals.

The Meeting will be hosted by Prof. Andy Lawrence and the newly (today !) appointed Astronomer Royal for Scotland Prof. Catherine Heymans.

The event will be broadcast live on You Tube, it is important that people watch to show their concerns.

The link to details of the meeting is at https://www.astronomyedinburgh.org/even ... -the-sky/ . I will be there and hope to see a significant number of SPA members in the audience.

Regards

John Murrell FRAS, Member ASE

Your data is clearly based on the "Chicken Little" hypothesis.
Last night I observed 17 Starlinks, only one of which (19-74AF) reached a magnitude of +3.5
The others had magnitudes clustered around +6 - just one-tenth of the brightness of your
scaremongering prediction.

Stella - the figures I quoted are at your zenith. At lower declination the satellites are further away so the brightness falls as the inverse square of the distance to the satellite. When the constellations are launched there will be several near your zenith at any time. You can see the current position of all the satellites on Heavens Above.

In addition a lot of sattelites at present are in a higher orbit but they are going to put most of the new satellites in lower orbits.

John Murrell

I have no time for this nonsense. Someone is annoyed a private company (and let's be honest - Marxists don't like Musk) is launching their own global communications system that makes all existing systems obsolete. Sat phones/internet for the masses, cheap.

As for astronomy...I agree it could be annoying for astrophotographers, but let's be serious: there is a ton of stuff up there already. Sure, they may be visible, but I don't remember anyone complaining about the Iridium satellites, or the ISS.

This is an entirely political argument; not factual.

AstroTux,

All your replies are political.

John Murrell cannot answer you, because he unfortunately died too young.

This is not a political forum.

It is not a place to preach unbalanced views.