So last night around 9:40 I was out back with the tripod trying to get a shot of Orion before the moon came up and washed everything out. Nothing fancy, just my old D750, a 50mm f/1.8 thats worth more used than new at this point, and a $19 remote shutter release I bought off Amazon two years ago that somehow still has battery in it. Twenty second exposures, ISO 1600, the whole low-budget astrophotography routine I've been doing on and off since college.
About four minutes into it I noticed a string of lights crossing the frame in the preview. Not a plane, not a shooting star, a straight line of maybe a dozen little dots moving in formation, evenly spaced, all the same brightness. My first thought was UFO convoy, which tells you how much sleep I'd had. Then I remembered SpaceX had put another 60 Starlink satellites up that morning, launched out of Florida, and it clicked. That's the thing I'd read about on an astronomy forum back when the first batch went up last spring and wrecked everyone's calibration shots.
That's four batches now since May, so a couple hundred of these things are up there depending how you count. Musk's stated plan is eventually thousands, enough to blanket the globe with broadband, which is a genuinely useful thing if you live somewhere without cable and don't want to pay satellite internet prices that cap you at 25gb a month. I get the appeal, I really do. I just also completely get why the people who do actual astronomy for a living are furious. You can't really shoot long exposure deep sky stuff anymore without editing out satellite trails, and it's only getting more crowded from here.
I ended up with one usable frame out of about fifteen, the rest either had the satellite train running through them or some dog walker's headlamp bouncing off a low cloud. Not exactly a huge loss, I'm not submitting to National Geographic here, but it was annoying in a very specific way that felt new. Like watching a tech company's product roadmap physically drift across your hobby while you're in the middle of it.
Mentioned this to my neighbor the next morning while getting the mail, he's the one with an actual telescope, not a repurposed camera lens, and he just shrugged and said he's already resigned to it. Told me the astronomy subreddits have been arguing about it for months. Some people want SpaceX to coat the satellites so they reflect less light, which apparently is being tested. Some people have basically decided the sky is just messier now and that's the deal going forward. I don't know exactly where I land on it. I don't think SpaceX is evil for wanting to sell internet access to places that genuinely don't have good options. But nobody exactly asked the rest of us if we were fine with a visible train of hardware crossing overhead every clear night for the next decade either.
Small aside since I'm already here: if you want to actually go watch one of these passes instead of just complaining about it after the fact, there's a site called findstarlink.com someone built that gives you exact pass times for your location. Worked great, told me almost to the minute when it'd show up. Kind of impressive that someone had that running within a day or two of the orbital data being public.
Apple also had its earnings call this week, best quarter the company's ever had, iPhone sales up again on the back of the 11. I'm sure every other tech blog on the internet has that one covered six ways already so I'll leave it alone. The satellite thing felt like the more interesting story to actually sit with anyway, mostly because I watched it happen with my own eyes instead of reading a press release about it.
Going to try for that Orion shot again this weekend. Checking pass times first this time.