Mastodawn

I blew off a LOT of emails while at the Canadian Astronomical Society meeting last week! And I have almost dug myself out of that email pile (well, as good as that ever gets).

There was one email I almost blew off during the meeting because I assumed it was an astronomer asking for a visualization of future satellites. But it was actually someone from CNN(!!) asking! Oops.

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Prof. Sam Lawler 5d ago

After some back-and-forth trying to understand exactly what they were asking for NOW NOW NOW, @hannorein made exactly what they were looking for.

Please enjoy(?) this horrifying visualization of how many Starlink sats are in orbit right now, and how many SpaceX has asked for in the future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfOgp9gp2hA

Alt-text for video in link: the Earth getting gradually surrounded by a grid of more and more orbiting satellites, until the million data centre plan completely hides Earth.

Current and future megaconstellations.

YouTube

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Miah Johnson 5d ago

@sundogplanets @hannorein last night I was sitting on the shore of White Lake with friends. It was beautifully dark and the stars were all visible. We all couldn't help but notice how many satellites we saw and we were discussing how different the sky was from when we were kids and how it would never be like that ever again. Every moment we stared at the stars we'd spot another satellite, dozens and dozens over the 2 hours we sat there talking and watching.

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Miah Johnson

@sundogplanets @hannorein another thing we noticed was that the satellites defined a sky limit for us. Without the satellites we couldn't see the edge of our planets sky, we just saw darkness and stars, but now we could almost see the invisible sphere of sky surrounding our home as so many satellites orbited.