View of Darksat among others Starlink satellites (by Thierry Legault). Watch in HD.

Well that's not too good...

in terms of the dark satellite's reflectivity still being quite brighter than I think a lot of us were expecting/hoping (if this is indeed footage of the dark sat).

So ya, hopefully there will eventually be a way to alleviate that reflectivity, and SpaceX still has a few more tricks up their sleeve to try out.

But... until then, the show must go on, and humanity must progress.


A couple of side notes worth mentioning:

1) For regular viewers of the nightsky, observation of these satellites will mostly be a near-sunset, or near-sunrise phenomena if they're passing over your location.

2) Also for regular viewers: keep in mind these satellites will dim considerably as their altitude gradually increases from the 200km to the 500km range. (Right now they're in their deployment altitude, closer to Earth than their normal operating altitude.)

3) As for the pros... the astronomers/astrophysicists... many of them will be able to work around Starlink--so it would seem, for now. One important tool will be scheduling of their image runs, with up to date positional-tracking information provided by SpaceX.

4) For other astronomical projects it's much more complicated than that, and there will likely be Starlink streaks in every single one of their image-run frames, unavoidably, which is not great for those astronomers. So I can understand they're not going to be jumping for joy and cheerful about that.

5) For radio astronomers... SpaceX has agreed to avoid a certain narrow range of their licensed spectrum, which helps those astronomers. But again, with radio astronomy it's complicated, with a lot of big issues not only with Starlink, but also arising right here on Earth, with terrestrial transmitters as well.

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