Since I rarely shoot the northern sky, to date I haven’t had an incursion by the nearly-600 Starlink satellites that have been launched by SpaceX to date. Comet NEOWISE provided an ‘opportunity’ (cough!) to capture a Starlink train, and although the satellites were not visible to the naked eye, boy did they impact the image. Below is an image of Comet NEOWISE and Starlink Train, captured from near Crested Butte, CO.
We’ve all sat around wondering how this is going to change astrophotography for the future, and now that I’ve seen the affect upon our night sky, I can foresee the day when wide-field astrophotography will become all but untenable. When the Starlink constellation of 12,000+ satellites is fully implemented, our planet will have a veritable ‘net’ of these things in virtually every quadrant of the sky, and there will be no escaping it. I’m sure better software solutions will be developed, but it’s hard to imagine a Milky Way image wouldn’t be negatively impacted by digital gyrations to remove and replace the data.
Not sure what to say about Starlink, as I support the goal of providing internet services to most of earth, but I question whether the populations that need it will have the resources to access it. I wasn’t born yesterday, and realize this will likely be a large cash cow for Elon Musk, one that will hopefully allow SpaceX to get to Mars a decade or so sooner than otherwise. Tradeoff? Surely. Worth it? Time will tell…
