ccamrobertson19 minutes ago
While I pine for a dark sky, it makes sense that these operations should move in the same way century old optical telescopes in cities are no longer used for cutting edge science.
The far side of the moon seems like an increasingly viable option.
robryan26 minutes ago
> Algorithmic mitigation is being explored, but scientists describe it as “embryonic” — potentially demanding computing power that rivals the science processing itself.
It sounds like this would work? Just be more costly, at least in the short term.
> Engineering fixes are the real answer
What is the fix and tradeoff? The article doesn't seem to cover it at all.
RockRobotRockan hour ago
maybe Internet for people on earth matters more than astronomy
defrost42 minutes ago
We had that before Starlink flooded the radio quiet zones with leakage.
bcraven30 minutes ago
Were that the case, there would have been nobody buying Starlink.
As they are, I think you are wrong.
chaostheory10 minutes ago
[delayed]
cozzyd26 minutes ago
These are either incidental or unauthorized transmissions. Not the Ku band downlink to terminals.
sh-run22 minutes ago
I have such a love hate relationship with the tech. On one hand, I live on the edge of the mountains and can get away while on-call, set up my starlink and still be within SLAs if I got paged while out of service (weekend pages are fairly rare). On the other hand, I'm an amateur astronomer, for visual astro, it's not a huge deal, but I see how it could be for astrophotography (streaks) and obviously it's a problem for radio.
stackghost13 minutes ago
I agree. Enlarging Elon Musk’s fortune is significantly more pressing than the ability to learn about the origins of the universe, or enjoying the night sky.
cwillu7 minutes ago
“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hizonner44 minutes ago
That might be dispositive if we didn't already have almost everybody on Earth wired up without using satellites.
asdfasgasdgasdg41 minutes ago
The fact that so many people are paying for starlink suggests that it is adding something important that was missing before.
fluidcruft36 minutes ago
Streaming video on airplane flights?
db48x20 minutes ago
Most of Starlink’s customers are simply rural people who want Internet access at decent speeds. There are wide swathes of the US where Starlink’s best competition is measured in kilobytes per second.
defrost10 minutes ago
Seems like a case for the US having better fibre deployment than it does for leaking interference from unshielded poorly made tin cans.
electric_mayheman hour ago
That’s a mighty nice field of study you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it
db48x11 minutes ago
What I want to know is why astronomers are bitching about Starlink instead of capitalizing on the vastly reduced launch costs it brought about. Falcon 9 has been launching satellites for anyone who asks for a decade now. Where is Harvard’s space telescope? Last I heard they have a 50 billion dollar endowment. They could easily splash out on a space telescope for a fraction of that. James Webb and GAIA are amazing, but we could have a whole networked constellation of space telescopes by now if the universities had been on the ball.
defrost6 minutes ago
Ground constellations (eg: SKA in radio astronomy) are still vastly cheaper than orbiting arrays, also easier wrt incremental upgrade via physical visits, etc.
spdustinan hour ago
I just have to say: I _hate_ with a white-hot fury the growing usage of html-load and error-report dot com bullshit on these sites. I block those domains for gratuitous ad-serving, and sites just cycle a modal error now.
(I know, I could disable JavaScript everywhere and enable it on a site-by-site basis. Maybe that time has come.)
bix6an hour ago
I’ve got JavaScript disabled and no websites work.
dmix38 minutes ago
And nothing was lost
[deleted]an hour agocollapsed