Will Low Earth Orbit Satellites Take Over the Night Sky?

In March 2020 I was out a couple of nights doing my normal thing shooting night photography and time-lapse sequences. On these two nights I encountered something I hadn’t seen before: streams of satellites streaking across my shots. On the first night I was out shooting a Milky Way panorama before dawn, and they were passing overhead the entire time I was shooting the panorama. I put the camera aiming down their path to shoot the composite star trails image above, as the skies were brightening from the oncoming twilight.

The next morning before dawn it was the same story, but this time I captured it in a time-lapse sequence, so you can see it in video:

A second camera also captured a sequence of satellites, although not as bright, so it’s not entirely clear to me whether this was the same group of satellites or another one:

In the panorama from the first night, the panorama covers enough of the sky to catch them coming and going.

Twilight was starting and dozens fo satellites flew by for many minutes, so I couldn’t simply re-shoot the panorama.

Sunlight reflected off of the solar panels of one of the satellites. The angle had to be just right as the other dozens of satellites were in a slightly different position in the sky, and therefore did not have quite the right angle to bound sunlight to my location.

These Starlink satellites form a “constellation” of dozens of StarLink satellites. There are 300+ of them in the air so far, but that installation alone could result in up to 12,000 satellites when fully deployed. Amazon may compete with them with 3236 more satellites. The U.S. Army is looking at the technology. Vodafone and Rakuten have invested in a SpaceMobile venture. It’s going to get really crowded up there really fast!

These are the “good old days”, or nights, of night photography. Enjoy them while you can.