How Can Astronomers Overcome The Damage Being Done By Satellite Mega-Constellations?
Over the coming decades, over 100,000 new satellites are expected.
For countless millennia, whenever we were faced with a clear, cloudless, moonless night, all of humanity was able to witness the full beauty of a dark, pristine sky. From any location on Earth, thousands of stars could be seen at once, as well as intricate features in the Milky Way, a handful of other galaxies, and even a number of nebulae, star clusters, and other deep sky objects. With the advent of the telescope — and later, photographic techniques and equipment — those numbers exploded. Our views of the distant Universe were limited only by our technology and the investments we made in them.
But two developments have come along to change that. The first was electric lighting, which led to cities, towns, and now even rural areas frequently emitting more light from the ground than everything in the sky combined. As it stands today, only a small percentage of Earth’s population can see more than a few hundred stars with the naked eye over the course of the night. But the second development — artificial satellites — is extremely recent, only affecting the night sky since the dawn of the space age. At the start of 2019, there were approximately 2,000 active satellites…
