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I’m trying to follow Comet 29P as far into the evening twilight as possible to keep an eye on its decline from its recent outburst. These images aren’t pretty since they were taken in bright twilight at low altitude with some drifting cloud but they show multiple trails from the Starlink-3 launch. The two images are a comparison of average and sigma clip stack of 10 frames. An animated GIF showing the individual frames is here. There is another launch of 60 tomorrow and thousands more to go up. This is the first time that I’ve imaged the Starlink satellites without planning to do so. I’m sure there will be many more.
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Its interesting that Wikipedia cite SpaceX as identifying a possible $30B market for Starlink services. So, given a toss up between his company making ludicrous mounts of cash (3:1 return on investment) and saving astronomy which do you reckon he will go for?
Starlink might better be advertised as ” Enabling rural gamers”.
Shame PPARC (now STFC) cannot get a royalty for the use by SpaceX of the name of their late lamented Starlink astronomy software project.
I get these intrusive trails on my meteor cameras predominantly in the morning before dawn. Here are two images close together on the morning of March 12. As astronomers we record what ever is going on in our skies, these man made events will be part of that. We were all excited to see Sputnik in 1957, it heralded a new era for mankind, this latest development in part of the same era. Let us hope that the effect of these on our images can be diminished in the future by making them less reflective, but don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen!
Hi Dennis,
Me too! It is a right royal pain in the celestial bum for my HD meteor camera system!
Progress, they say….
Cheers,
Bill.
At least the next 60 have been delayed a bit by today’s Falcon 9 post-start launch abort. So far I’ve not found the trails troublesome on my meteor cameras. The satellite motion is too slow to trigger them and I only pick of the trails if something else does. Denis, I know it is not a problem where you are but I have many more problems with aircraft trails. I guess that problem might decrease a bit over the next few weeks.
During the period when the volcano Eyjfjallajokull was blowing its top in Iceland and flights over the UK were closed down, we had a surprising run of clear night when a high pressure occurred. It will be interesting to see if that sort of thing repeats.
Hi Denis,
Just wait until Scotland’s Spaceport is in operation and they start buzzing rocketplanes over your head… 🙂
Clear skies,
Alex.
If they cross Denis I would be really worried since the spaceport is on the north coast and they will be aiming north on the one day a year that it is calm enough to launch…
Oh. Not exactly quiet yet, is it?
I was supposed to be going to one of the Scottish islands for my wedding anniversary and first Flybe went under and then Loganair cancelled my flight from Glasgow, so I had figured things were a bit quieter than that.
My attention has just been drawn to a paper by Jonathon McDowell and available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.07446
One of his references is to a paper by Buffon published in 1777.
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