It is SO COOL that astronomers found a 1m asteroid before impact and people could to watch it explode! It is also SO COOL that we have the ability to deflect a hazardous asteroid! (Thanks, DART)
But this all depends on clear skies for ground-based telescopes to find these very faint moving dots. Guess what makes that harder? Light pollution and bright satellites.
Turn off your lights and don't buy LEO satellite internet (or tell your provider to make their sats darker)
Go enjoy your dark skies! Get out of the city and look up. It's changing fast.
#astrodon and #SaveTheNightSky story time!
It's been almost exactly 1 year since CNN sent a crew to Regina to film me talking about satellite pollution. Their video story is really excellent: https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/04/04/spacex-satellite-pollution-gothere-cnn-plus.cnn
(side note: I knitted the hat and the cowl I'm wearing in different parts of the interview!)
And get yourself out to a dark place to enjoy the sky! Light pollution map here: https://www.cleardarksky.com/maps/lp/large_light_pollution_map.html
If you are out there more than 2 hours after sunset or more than 2 hours before sunrise, almost none of the satellites will be visible, so enjoy that dark time. That's what I'm holding on to.
I guess I'll end with my usual plea: don't buy Starlink internet. Or if you do, please tell them that you, a paying customer, care about the night sky. They need to make it a priority to make their satellites fainter and use fewer of them - this is a very doable engineering problem that they don't care about right now. There are many other ways to provide internet around the world that don't ruin the night sky and destroy low-Earth orbit.
James Lowenthal (Smith College) put together this video (taken last summer) of the dark night sky with only 3500 satellites. SpaceX has since launched almost 1000 more, all naked-eye visible when sunlit.
https://vimeo.com/718712501
I now have a continuous line of Starlinks crawling across my sky all night long. How bad is the satellite light pollution from your favourite dark sky location?
Prof. Sam Lawler