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cperciva 1 hours ago [-]
The hard part came next. Larsen spent about 45 hours layering the individual photos – each of which contained about 25 satellites – over one another, using Adobe Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
This is less an "image of our satellite-choked night skies" and more "a completely mendacious image produced using Photoshop".
happytoexplain 57 minutes ago [-]
You are being uncharitable. There is nothing misleading about this, or any other, nightsky timeseries image. It claims to show the paths of satellites over 2 hours, and that's what it does. You have to edit things like this to reveal the signal and keep relatively constant elements from overwhelming the result. Astronomers do this exact same thing (erasing things that obscure the subject over time).
Even if I were to be as charitable as possible to your interpretation, "mendacious" is way too strong a word, and implies an unreasonable bitterness.
jebarker 49 minutes ago [-]
I have no problem with the image and it illustrates a real phenomena. There is something slightly misleading about it though: if you point a camera in the same direction for 2 hours, take many images and then layer the images you wouldn't have a static star background like is shown here. You'd only get that star background if you used a star tracker and kept pointing at the same place in the night sky but then the foreground would be changing.
fooker 18 minutes ago [-]
No it is correct. I dabble in astrophotography.
The purpose of stacking hundreds of photos is to get rid of noise and unwanted trails like this.
The effort involved here is to go out of your way to do the exact opposite, specifically make sure things that are in a single exposure show up in the stack.
Aurornis 39 minutes ago [-]
The image itself is interesting, but the context in which it’s presented in this article is dishonest.
The headline is the worst offender, saying that the skies are “choked” with satellites.
The headline is misleading. The photo alone is interesting with the right context.
wat10000 35 minutes ago [-]
The guy who actually made the image seems to just think it's cool: "I knew if I carried on it would look even better and more impressive in terms of satellite numbers."
But the framing from others is terrible. "Who gave anyone permission do this?" Um, every single satellite ever launched has gone through government approvals. Sorry if you didn't start paying attention to the world of space flight until it ruined your attempt at photography, but that's on you.
bix6 27 minutes ago [-]
lol what. Regular citizens don’t get a say on satellites and many would prefer we didn’t put so many up. “National Security” will trump any citizen concerns every time.
pintxo 22 minutes ago [-]
To be fair, the majority of satellites now seems to exist because "money" will trump any citizen concerns every time.
bix6 9 minutes ago [-]
Agreed, I should’ve added that as the other overriding case
wat10000 21 minutes ago [-]
Not sure how you saw "government" and read it as "regular citizens," but do go back and read it again.
bix6 9 minutes ago [-]
Exactly. The regular citizens don’t get to participate in the decision.
boxed 33 minutes ago [-]
If you do the exact opposite then? You take a very long exposure and you mask away the satellite trails and post the image as "image of how the satellites don't pollute the sky".. that's the exact same thing in reverse.
The image in the original post is not too far from what you get with an actual telescope.
ryandvm 56 minutes ago [-]
I don't understand. Are you laboring under the impression that the artist is trying to convince people that this is what the night sky looks like at any given moment? What even are you upset about?
Kevin_Flynn 1 hours ago [-]
It did say he was a photographer, not an astronomer.
Surely an astronomer would have software for this that would produce a more accurate picture.
misnome 58 minutes ago [-]
Almost any astronomy processing software does this for free, because when you stack a whole load of images it rejects outlier pixels (e.g. a trail present on only one image out of hundreds).
It then usually gives you an image of both the combined success, and an image of just those pixels that were rejected. So, this.
cperciva 1 hours ago [-]
An astronomer would presumably not erase the stars.
SiempreViernes 22 minutes ago [-]
Why not? Stars are boring, the cool things are galaxies.
misnome 1 hours ago [-]
Actually, this is pretty common for non-scientific astrophotography! Erase Stars -> Edit background and stars colour, contrast etc separately -> Recombine!
bix6 59 minutes ago [-]
The point of the image is to make a point. Art is provocative. Our skies are choked as anyone who makes Astro images will tell you.
Aurornis 36 minutes ago [-]
> Art is provocative
The misleading part is that readers don’t see that it’s provocative art until you carefully read the details. It’s presented like documentary evidence of what the problem looks like.
The photographer might not have intended it this way, but the writers of this post took advantage of that.
bix6 32 minutes ago [-]
The first sentence literally says it’s a multi image composite so…
Aurornis 17 minutes ago [-]
That’s not the misleading part. You don’t need an explanation to see that it’s a composite.
The misleading part is where he edited out the stars by hand.
> Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
The photographer wasn’t misleading. He made a cool photo. The headline is misleading.
happytoexplain 10 minutes ago [-]
There's nothing misleading about removing light sources to reveal other light sources. You're speaking as though they erased all the sky's stars. The image is full of stars. This is petty.
7 minutes ago [-]
hparadiz 56 minutes ago [-]
I really like the photo and what it represents. We're growing as a civilization and I think that's beautiful.
bix6 31 minutes ago [-]
Meanwhile I’d like to be able to enjoy the stars without Elon’s shit in my face. Can’t wait for the Coca Cola advertisements some day.
hparadiz 26 minutes ago [-]
The rest of us enjoy having high speed internet globally.
2 minutes ago [-]
6 minutes ago [-]
happytoexplain 16 minutes ago [-]
"Rest of us" is not a reasonable phrase here. You do not speak for the global population. It's not everybody vs bix6.
ktm5j 38 minutes ago [-]
The photographer was completely transparent about how the image was produced and what it means.. how you manage to color this as dishonest is beyond me.
38295gksnf9588 59 minutes ago [-]
It’s called art.
jpardoe 1 hours ago [-]
Has he not heard of AI?
jefftk 50 minutes ago [-]
A lot of people are going to look at that manually edited image, think it's a traditional long-exposure photo, and conclude that satellites are much more of a problem for astronomy than they really are.
The photographer made a really neat picture, but Kottke is presenting it a headline that suggests its something else and generally without enough context.
Aurornis 34 minutes ago [-]
Ironically, the same technique used to remove the stars and isolate the satellites could have been used to remove the satellites and isolate the stars.
It would take 100X less effort to remove the satellites.
happytoexplain 13 minutes ago [-]
Why is that ironic?
You're just pointing out that there are tools to automate this.
1e1a 20 minutes ago [-]
Why any less effort? Masking the stars out and masking them in should take the same amount of time and effort.
Aurornis 18 minutes ago [-]
From the article:
> Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
Many more stars than satellites in every frame. Erasing a couple satellites at most is quick. Erasing every star in the sky and keeping a couple satellites is not.
happytoexplain 38 minutes ago [-]
Its parameters are very well described and the result is beautiful (visually), interesting, and provocative. Yes, people will misinterpret all sorts of things like this, but I don't know what else the author could have done besides not create it at all, for fear of... these accusations?
Aurornis 33 minutes ago [-]
Photographer made a cool photo.
Headline writer, a different person, used it to create misleading headlines.
boxed 32 minutes ago [-]
"Photographer made a cool image"
There I fixed it for you. This isn't a photo in any traditional sense.
Technically it is a limited resource, since there is only a finite volume. But we're nowhere near close to any notion of it being "full." Efficient rent would be approximately zero.
hagbard_c 49 minutes ago [-]
To whom would they pay 'rent'? What would be done with the money?
Don't go there, it leads to nothing but more waste, abuse and corruption. If it becomes necessary there can be some form of arbitrage in how LEO is used, we're not there yet though. Maybe something like the auctions for bandwidth for mobile operators but again, where does the money go? If institutionalised it will just turn into another slush fund for whatever interests, many of them corrupt or nonsensical, to drain.
safog 48 minutes ago [-]
It is a bit ridiculous these days and it's only going to get worse with basically every major country needing to do a version of this for defence purposes.
Go out tonight and just look at the sky for 5 mins and I'll guarantee you'll see a couple of satellites flying past.
As with a lot of other technologies, the genie is out of the bottle and I don't think we're putting him back there again, this is the future.
wat10000 28 minutes ago [-]
What makes it "ridiculous"? I can go outside and look at the sky for five minutes and see airplanes flying past, does that mean our air traffic is also ridiculous?
Of all the things to be outraged over... satellites provide extremely valuable services and are pretty near harmless. There's the pollution from the launches, some uncertain concern over putting materials into the upper atmosphere when they reenter, and that's about it. The thing people complain about most is that they get in the way of photographs of the starts. Which is annoying, but also seems to be easily worked around, and is pretty small potatoes compared to planet-wide communications. Your neighbor operating a leaf blower with a dirty two-stroke engine is harming you more than these satellites are.
codingconstable 34 minutes ago [-]
ouch more dishes than a tapas bar
1 hours ago [-]
tetraodonpuffer 55 minutes ago [-]
it seems fairly evenly distributed besides the aggregation in the middle, what orbit would that be? why are there so many satellites there?
wat10000 21 minutes ago [-]
Most satellites in low orbit are Starlink, and most Starlink satellites are at either 43° or 53° inclinations, so it's probably those. These inclinations cover most of the population in the most efficient manner. Low inclinations don't cover people at higher latitudes. (Inclination is equal to the highest latitude that the satellite will reach, and then coverage extends a little further since they have some slant range.) Higher inclinations waste more time over unpopulated regions.
tetraodonpuffer 16 minutes ago [-]
I guess given we have the location, time and what looks like venus to the bottom right it should be possible to figure out the direction the picture was taken in to figure out the exact inclinations of the orbits but yeah, makes sense it'd be starlink
Kevin_Flynn 1 hours ago [-]
Looks like some of the first 8-bit Moiré pattern demos.
This is less an "image of our satellite-choked night skies" and more "a completely mendacious image produced using Photoshop".
Even if I were to be as charitable as possible to your interpretation, "mendacious" is way too strong a word, and implies an unreasonable bitterness.
The purpose of stacking hundreds of photos is to get rid of noise and unwanted trails like this.
The effort involved here is to go out of your way to do the exact opposite, specifically make sure things that are in a single exposure show up in the stack.
The headline is the worst offender, saying that the skies are “choked” with satellites.
The headline is misleading. The photo alone is interesting with the right context.
But the framing from others is terrible. "Who gave anyone permission do this?" Um, every single satellite ever launched has gone through government approvals. Sorry if you didn't start paying attention to the world of space flight until it ruined your attempt at photography, but that's on you.
Both can't be non-misleading right?
The image in the original post is not too far from what you get with an actual telescope.
Surely an astronomer would have software for this that would produce a more accurate picture.
It then usually gives you an image of both the combined success, and an image of just those pixels that were rejected. So, this.
The misleading part is that readers don’t see that it’s provocative art until you carefully read the details. It’s presented like documentary evidence of what the problem looks like.
The photographer might not have intended it this way, but the writers of this post took advantage of that.
The misleading part is where he edited out the stars by hand.
> Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
The photographer wasn’t misleading. He made a cool photo. The headline is misleading.
The photographer made a really neat picture, but Kottke is presenting it a headline that suggests its something else and generally without enough context.
It would take 100X less effort to remove the satellites.
You're just pointing out that there are tools to automate this.
> Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
Many more stars than satellites in every frame. Erasing a couple satellites at most is quick. Erasing every star in the sky and keeping a couple satellites is not.
Headline writer, a different person, used it to create misleading headlines.
There I fixed it for you. This isn't a photo in any traditional sense.
with now https://satellitemap.space/s/R4YUwDQn
If so, do Starlink and others pay rent? Should they (to ensure efficient use of the resource)?
https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashclock/
Don't go there, it leads to nothing but more waste, abuse and corruption. If it becomes necessary there can be some form of arbitrage in how LEO is used, we're not there yet though. Maybe something like the auctions for bandwidth for mobile operators but again, where does the money go? If institutionalised it will just turn into another slush fund for whatever interests, many of them corrupt or nonsensical, to drain.
Go out tonight and just look at the sky for 5 mins and I'll guarantee you'll see a couple of satellites flying past.
As with a lot of other technologies, the genie is out of the bottle and I don't think we're putting him back there again, this is the future.
Of all the things to be outraged over... satellites provide extremely valuable services and are pretty near harmless. There's the pollution from the launches, some uncertain concern over putting materials into the upper atmosphere when they reenter, and that's about it. The thing people complain about most is that they get in the way of photographs of the starts. Which is annoying, but also seems to be easily worked around, and is pretty small potatoes compared to planet-wide communications. Your neighbor operating a leaf blower with a dirty two-stroke engine is harming you more than these satellites are.
Makes perfect sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern
* https://satellitemap.space
* https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization