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The Green Flash

The green flash. While at first, it may sound like the love child of two DC comic book characters, its name is actually much more literal. It’s a flash. That’s green. If you’ve seen Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, you may be familiar with the idea. While Hollywood’s version of the green flash is massive and spectacular, the real life version (yes, there is a real life version) is much more subtle and easy to miss.

It can be seen for a brief moment on the horizon, right around sunrise and sunset when the conditions are right. But what are these conditions and what causes the last rays of sunlight to appear to us on Earth as a bright green?

Part of the answer lies in the refraction of light that happens in the Earth’s atmosphere. The most recognizable and well known example of light refracting is the rainbow. As sunlight makes the quick transition from air to water during its travel, the light is bent, or refracted, and separates out into all the colors contained therein (think Dark Side of the Moon album cover). You’ve also seen this effect if you’ve stuck a straw into a clear glass of water. The straw suddenly seems to defy physics and abruptly veers from its path so that the part above water appears to not quite connect to the part below water.

If you subscribe to our newsletter, you’ve also read about how we at the MROI have to deal with the atmosphere’s pesky tendency to refract starlight. In Project Scientist Michelle Creech-Eakman’s Instrumentation Station article titled What is a Delay Line and Why Do We Need Ten of Them?, she likens the light emanating from the stars to a sheet of paper with a picture on it. At first the picture is flat and perfect. But as this light paper reaches our atmosphere, the light paper begins to crumple and distort. To find out how that light paper gets flattened back out into an image we can see, take a look at Dr. Creech-Eakman’s article in the June newsletter.

But back to the green flash. As with the rainbow, one effect of this bending is for light to be separated into its distinct wavelengths: different colors. The green light is the color that is in our line of site while the rest of the colors dip below the horizon, thus: a green flash.

While the green flash is most commonly observed when looking out across the ocean, it can be seen from anywhere in the world. It is easiest to see when the observer has an unobstructed view of the horizon and the air is clear and still. Next time you happen to be outside right before sunrise or right after sunset, take a look and see if you can spot it! This is not a suggestion to stare directly at the sun. Wait for the moment just after the sun has set or the moment just before it rises. We can’t promise any souls will return to Earth as was signified by the appearance of the green flash in the Pirates movies, but we can guarantee it’s a pretty neat sight!

Article by Shelbi Etscorn of the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Department of Outreach and Communications.

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Painting The Night With Light!

Those of us who do astronomical observing go to great lengths to seek out dark sky sites to carry out our observations, whether professional or amateur. But occasionally I tend to stray from the accepted norm, and rather than avoid the light I create it – I’m a light painter!

Image #1, Milky Way over the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer facility.

Light painting is an art form using various sources of light to create a pattern or illuminate objects in a dark scene, which is captured by taking a long exposure photograph. Exposure times for such photographs can range from a few seconds to an hour or more, and the resulting images are unlike anything you could see with your naked eye. To create a light painting photograph, you need to use a camera on which you can control the shutter speed, and a tripod, to keep your camera steady for the duration of the exposure.

Image #2, playing with light at the MROI Beam Combining Facility.

In its simplest form, parts of a dark scene are illuminated with a light source such as a flashlight. This is the method I used in the images numbered 1, 2 & 3. In image #1 I painted the foreground and structures with a red flashlight from a distance. Had the structures not been illuminated in this way, they would have appeared as silhouettes. This method of illuminating objects was employed on the header image of this post as well, although it was more involved because we used a color-changing flashlight to illuminate the delay line’s supporting structures, and a laser light to illuminate the delay line and walls. The camera shutter was open for more than five minutes in this image.

In image #2 above, both the subject and the background structure were illuminated with a red flashlight, then the wings were created by flashing an image of wings on the wall behind the subject with a camera strobe light attached to a special device much like a miniature slide projector.

Image #3, observing under the Milky Way in the canyons outside of Socorro, New Mexico.

In image #3 above, I “painted” the walls of the canyon with a red flashlight, then painted the telescope observer from behind with a flash unit.

Image #4, light painting tools. Most of the tools I use are homemade, but I base their construction around the universal connector manufactured by Light Painting Brushes (LPB), which enables you connect many sizes of flashlights to a standard tool size. I also use many of LPB’s tools, such as fiber optics brushes, colored light hoods, and light sabers, shown in the left side of this image.

A more complex method of light painting is to move through the dark scene while creating a pattern with one or more light sources, which are usually specialized light painting tools such as those shown above in image #4. The tool is connected to a light source (flashlight), then you move the tool in a controlled motion to create the desired pattern.

Image #5, light painting around one of the telescope domes at New Mexico Tech’s Etscorn Campus Observatory.

Images numbered 5, 6, and 7 are examples of this method. The slight difference between image number 7 and the others is that the light sources used to spell out MROI were sparklers rather than typical light tools.

Image #6, a vortex of light painted around an MROI telescope.
Image #7, MROI spelled out by MROI staff members using sparklers, taken at the New Mexico Tech golf course.

It is also possible to create a light painting effect simply by taking a long exposure in a dimly lit scene, as in image #8 below. In this case the tent appears red not because it was painted with a red flashlight, but because the inside of the tent was lit with red lights. The light streaks in the scene were from the flashlights people were using to illuminate their way in the dark as they passed by my camera.

Image #8, people walking to and fro at the Enchanted Skies Star Party dark sky location in Magdalena, NM.

Another method of creating an intriguing light pattern in the dark is steel wool spinning. While it can be considered a type of light painting, it is in a category all its own. To create this type of image, you stuff a metal whisk with steel wool, ignite the steel wool using a lighter or 9v battery, then spin the whisk, which is suspended on the end of some type of cable, until the steel wool burns itself out. This is what was done in image #9 below. This method is not for the faint of heart, as you really are “playing with fire”. Moreover, you must be extremely cautious of how and where this activity is carried out, as the sparks from the steel wool can easily start a fire. However, with the proper precautions you can safely produce a stunning image.

Image #9, steel wool spinning at New Mexico Tech’s Etscorn Campus Observatory. In this image, I am spinning the steel wool on a whisk on a cable to the left, while our beloved Dr. Dan Klinglesmith (who passed away last year) was spinning the steel wool in a whisk in a drill from inside the telescope dome. I was using a remote trigger for my camera to produce this image.

Since I discovered the art form of light painting about 5 years ago, it has become one of my favorite photography genres. I’ve involved dozens of friends in the process of creating various types of light paintings, and as far as I can tell they’ve all enjoyed the process as much as I have. So the next time you find yourself in a dark setting with a camera, tripod, and a flashlight or two, you might want to try your hand at painting the night with light!

To see more light painting images, you can visit my Flickr page at https://www.flickr.com/photos/inlightful/albums

M. Colleen Gino, MRO Assistant Director of Outreach and Communications

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Langmuir Laboratory Featured in MROI August Newsletter

There’s no better time to talk about thunderstorms and lightning than during New Mexico’s monsoon season when we have plenty of both! The Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research, which is right up the road a bit from the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer, has been conducting research on Magdalena Ridge since 1963, when the facility was completed and dedicated. This month we are thrilled to feature an article about Langmuir Laboratory and its research written by Langmuir Director and New Mexico Tech Atmospherics Physics Professor, Harald Edens.

Image Credit: Harald Edens, Langmuir Laboratory

Below is an excerpt from Dr. Edens’ article:

“Experience gained by the early researchers lives on within the group to this day. In the atmospheric electricity research community, Langmuir Laboratory is well known for its expertise in lightning triggering, ballooning, radar, and other specialized instruments, much of which is custom designed and built in-house. Such instrumentation has proven transformative in the field of lightning research. Most recently, the late 90s saw the development of the three-dimensional Lightning Mapping Array (LMA), which is a set of ground-based VHF receivers that collectively map out lightning channels in three dimensions and time. It gives a complete picture of lightning activity inside a thunderstorm. Over the last decade, work at Langmuir Laboratory has redefined lightning interferometry, with the design of a VHF continuous broadband digital interferometer. It allows lightning flashes to be recorded and analyzed in their entirety, and in unprecedented detail. This resulted in important recent discoveries addressing the age-old question: How does lightning get started inside a thundercloud?”

Image Credit: Harald Edens, Langmuir Laboratory

To read about Langmuir Laboratory and more, visit the MRO website where our newsletters are available for free download.

If you’d like to receive the newsletter on the first of the month delivered directly to your email inbox, please consider becoming a member of our support group, Friends of MRO.

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Comet Hunter

A brave woman armed with the specialized tools of her trade sits alone in the dark and mentally prepares herself for the hunt. Her mission: to track down and identify some of the more elusive and exotic members of our solar system.

No, this is not an opening scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This could be you or me, a citizen scientist, using Photoshop to animate a set of images from one of NASA’s orbiting solar observatories to hunt for comets.

A few days back we learned about famous comet hunter Charles Messier and how his catalog of objects came about. By participating in one of NASA’s Citizen Science projects, you too can become a comet hunter even if you don’t have access to a telescope!

Enter NASA’s Sungrazer Project, where you can put your hunting skills to the test and hopefully discover a comet. Participants inspect images taken by the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) or NASA Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and look for objects moving in such a way that they may be comets. To date, over 4,000 comets have been discovered in SOHO data, with the majority of those found by citizen scientists. Moreover, over 99% of SOHO’s comet discoveries have come from its LASCO coronagraph, an instrument that uses an occulting disk to block the direct light from the sun, allowing faint objects in the vicinity of the sun to be visible.

Want to get involved in the hunt? You would start by downloading a set of SOHO/LASCO still images, then animate the images using a program such as Photoshop or GIMP. When you view the animation, you’ll see a lot of moving objects, most of them stars or sometimes a planet. It’s easy to rule out the stars in the SOHO/LASCO image animation because they always move horizontally from right to left and at the same speed as one another. Planets are easily identifiable as well, since they always move horizontally either right to left or left to right, and they are generally larger and brighter than stars. Another common sight will be cosmic rays, energetic particles striking the imaging sensor. Again, these are easily identifiable because they appear in only one frame of the animation as white dots, blobs, or streaks at random locations in the field of view. To get an idea of what you’re dealing with, click on the image below to view an animation of recent SOHO/LASCO data. It’s easy to identify the stars, a planet, and a multitude of cosmic rays.

The tricky bit is finding a comet in the midst of these predictably and chaotically moving objects. You are looking for a small, faint dot moving slowly through the animation, usually toward the Sun from the lower portion of the field of view. Comets are easily distinguishable from stars and planets, as they hardly ever move horizontally through the images, and they always move with a near constant speed, size, shape, and brightness. This small, faint, slowly moving dot must appear in at least five consecutive images before being reported as a potential comet. To find out if comet hunting is for you, download a sample set of data that includes a known comet (available at the bottom of this comet hunting guide web page), and see if you can pick it out of the crowd of stars, planets, and cosmic rays.

Comets not your cuppa? No problem! You can search for exoplanets, spot protoplanetary disks around nearby stars, or process and analyze images of Jupiter. Prefer to use your own telescope? You can submit data on the brightness and position of near Earth objects, or share your Jupiter images with the JunoCam team to help them plan future photographic missions.  

NASA’s citizen science projects are not limited to astronomy; you can find projects in the fields of geology, oceanography, meteorology, and more. Moreover, citizen science projects aren’t limited to NASA; use your computer’s down time to analyze radio telescope data for SETI, classify distant galaxies for Galaxy Zoo, help identify constellations in celestial maps for the Adler Planetarium, or transcribe the notebooks of the famous Harvard College Observatory women “computers” for the Smithsonian. The number of crowdsourcing projects continues to grow!  

Next time you have time to kill, why not stop your Pokémon Go, close your Candy Crush, and spend some time contributing to scientific research. Below you’ll find more links to help get you started on your own hunt:

https://www.zooniverse.org/projects

https://transcription.si.edu/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/citizen-science/

https://www.oldweather.org/

http://www.cosmologyathome.org/

https://einsteinathome.org/

https://www.uahirise.org/hiwish/

https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/nora-dot-eisner/planet-hunters-tess

http://scope.pari.edu/

https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/shannon-/solar-stormwatch-ii

https://www.aavso.org/observers

http://alpo-astronomy.org/lunarupload/lunimpacts.htm

Happy Hunting!

M. Colleen Gino, MRO Assistant Director of Outreach and Communications

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Faster Than A Speeding Bullet!

How fast is that, exactly? I had to look it up. The range I found was about 420 — 4665 fps (feet per second), which translates to 286 – 3180 mph (miles per hour). So while Superman is certainly super speedy, he can’t compete with the little specks of cometary debris I saw plowing through Earth’s atmosphere last night. Meteors travel anywhere from 25,000 to 160,000 mph through our atmosphere, and the average Perseid travels at the high end of that range, about 133,000 mph. So sorry to burst your bubble, fan folks, but I’m not convinced that Superman can outrun a meteor. It’s a darn good thing that the Perseid meteors originate from Comet Swift/Tuttle rather than Krypton, or Superman would really be in trouble…(BTW, I’m up for a discussion of the physics of Superman!)

Let’s back up a bit. On Monday I talked about the Perseids and suggested when and where you might go to see them for yourself (check it out here). Following my own advice, on Monday night I set up my camera in my yard and shot from about 10:30pm to 12:30am. During that time, I caught only one meteor, and it wasn’t even a Perseid, it was a sporadic. But honestly I didn’t expect much, since Monday night/Tuesday morning was not yet the peak of the shower, the time span over which you can expect to see the greatest number of meteors.

Hoping for better results, last night I met up with fellow MROI astrophotographer Dylan Etscorn at Box Canyon outside of Socorro, NM. I chose that location based on the information I gathered from variety of sources: 1) Weather Underground and Clear Dark Sky to be sure we’d have clear skies locally; 2) the LunaSolCal app to get the time and azimuth of moonrise; 3) Software Bisque’s TheSky software to see what would be where in the sky during the time I wanted to observe; and 4) Google Earth for geographic details of the Socorro area.

After checking all these sources, I determined that the constellation Perseus lined up well with the north end of the canyon, the galactic core portion of the Milky Way lined up well with the south end of the canyon, and that the east wall of the canyon was high enough to do a darn good job of blocking the Moon from view for an hour or more after it rose. In case you are wondering, yes, I go through this much checking and more when planning a photographic outing.

We dragged our collection of camera gear and comfy lounge chairs not far into the south end of the canyon, and had our cameras set up to automatically shoot continuous long exposures by 10:30 pm. Now it was time to settle into the comfy chairs and start counting meteors! At first I faced north toward the radiant in Perseus and my colleague faced south toward the Sagittarius and Scorpius in the Milky Way, with the thought that by looking in two different directions we’d see more meteors between us. But when my colleague’s meteor count quickly rose far above mine, I abandoned the radiant and faced south toward the galactic core as well. I’m glad I did, as I saw a handful of bright meteors with long trails traversing the Milky Way over the next several hours, such as the one in the image below.

One of the brighter Perseid meteors we observed right before midnight on August 11, 2020. This is a composite image; the main image of the sky is a single 25-second exposure taken with a Nikon D850 at ISO 4000 with a Rokinon f/2.8 12mm linear fisheye lens at f/4. The canyon walls were lit several different times by the headlights of cars coming in to the parking lot at Box Canyon; the lit portions of those several images were layered into the main image to create the composite.

To make a long observing session story short, in spite of repeatedly being buzzed by bats (which elicited a few shrieks here and there), having headlights from several other late night visitors beamed into our optics, and eventually being almost totally clouded out, my colleague counted over 90 meteors over the four hours we were camped in the canyon. Not the best numbers, but not terrible either. Frankly, just sitting outside under our reasonably dark skies in Socorro and enjoying the twinkling jewels of the night was more than enough for me!

If you have a story to share about your Perseid experience, we’d love to hear from you! Please post it below in the comments section. If you have a photo you’d be willing to share, please post it in the comments of this Facebook post!

M. Colleen Gino, MRO Assistant Director of Outreach and Communications

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The Messier Catalogue: The Masterpiece in the Mess

Once again we get to hear from MRO Outreach Assistant Shelbi Etscorn!

Have you ever searched for something in a cluttered purse or backpack and found that your hands seemed to be predisposed to grab every object except the one you’re looking for? You dig and dig, and your impatience grows with every passing second. If you’re like me, your frustration and agitation will eventually lead to you pulling out items one by one just to get them out of the way while you focus on finding the one thing you’re looking for. For most of us, the outcome of this labor is simply the retrieval of the object in question and perhaps a sense that you might want to consider cleaning out your bag. But when French astronomer, Charles Messier, applied this same concept to his hunt for comets, he ended up creating one of the most famous lists of astronomical objects ever compiled.

During the 17th century, Messier became the first astronomer to dedicate himself wholly to searching the night sky for comets. It proved to be a pursuit he was very adept at, earning him the title of the Comet Ferret by King Louis XV.

M 31, the Andromeda Galaxy

While scanning the sky searching for new apparitions, Messier came across the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant in the constellation Taurus. His excitement at finding what he initially mistook as a comet, quickly turned to frustration when he realized his error. To avoid being hoodwinked again, Messier jotted down the location of the object. He was effectively pulling the Crab Nebula out of the night sky and setting it to the side so it would not disturb his quest, much like the clutter pulled out of the bag.

It wasn’t until Messier added his third entry to his list of objects to disregard, that he began to actively search for these objects in the same way he had previously searched for comets. What he once saw as a mess was quickly becoming his masterpiece.

M42, The Orion Nebula

By 1771, Messier had compiled a list of 45 objects that had been discovered by himself and by his contemporaries. This initial catalogue was published in 1774 in the journal of the French Academy of Sciences.

By 1780, the catalogue had grown to include 80 objects.

By 1781, Messier published his final version which held 103 celestial objects.

The Messier catalogue as it is known today contains 110 objects. After his death, astronomers were guided by Messier’s notes to find the final seven contributions to the catalogue, the most recent of which wasn’t added until 1967. Among the catalogue can be found examples of all five types of deep-sky objects: diffuse nebulae, planetary nebulae, open clusters, globular clusters, and galaxies.

M45, The Pleiades

While Messier’s catalogue only includes objects visible from the European latitudes (being the objects which Messier could observe), it is still an extremely popular list for amateur astronomers and researchers alike owing to the fact that all of these objects are among the brightest, nearest, and most easily found objects in the sky. Messier was able to find them all using a 4-inch refracting telescope. Today, even basic telescopes available to amateur sky enthusiasts are capable of observing these objects with great detail.

Because of this, they have become some of the most popular objects observed during star parties, shot by astrophotographers, and researched by scientists. Even if you know very little about astronomy, chances are you’ve heard of at least one of these objects: The Andromeda Galaxy, the Orion Nebula, the Pleiades, and the Whirlpool Galaxy just to name a few. All of the heavy hitters of the astronomical world make the list. It reads like the who’s who of astronomical objects.

M20, the Trifid Nebula, and M8, the Lagoon Nebula

The next time you look up at the night sky, take a look at Messier’s catalogue and see if you can’t find a few. You’ll inevitably find yourself looking at some of the most beautiful objects in the night sky. The story of Messier and his catalogue is an excellent reminder to not become so focused on the task at hand that you are unable to see what beauty may lie in the road bumps along the way. You never know when the pebble in your shoe might prove to be gold. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, the clutter found in the mayhem of my purse remains: clutter. ­­­

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Catch a Falling Star

Or at least observe a few…That’s right, it’s time for the annual Perseid meteor shower, whom most agree puts on the best show for those of us in the northern hemisphere. The Perseids are predicted to peak on August 11 – 12. This year the celestial light show may be somewhat subdued due to the nearly last quarter Moon rising not long after the radiant of the shower in the constellation Perseus. Many of the fainter meteors will be lost in the glare of the Moon, but one should still see plenty of bright meteors, up to 50 an hour, and maybe even a fireball or two.

An annual meteor shower is one that occurs every year over the same period of time in a well-defined area of the sky. In the case of the Perseids, the meteors appear to come from the constellation Perseus. Meteor showers are named after the constellation that the radiant appears in, the radiant being the point in the sky in which the meteors appear to originate from.

Perseid meteor.

Meteors are little bits of debris (ranging in size from a grain of sand to a small pebble) left behind by comets and asteroids that strike the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up in a fiery streak of light. On any given night and depending upon your observing conditions, you can expect to see a handful of meteors coming from random directions in the sky, called sporadic meteors. Annual meteor showers occur when the Earth passes through the trail of debris left behind in the orbital path of a comet. The Perseids are from Comet Swift-Tuttle, a periodic comet that passes through our neighborhood every 133 years.

The brightness of a meteor depends both upon its size and the speed at which it passes through our atmosphere, with speeds ranging from 25,000 to 160,000 mph. Since the range of sizes of a meteor is pretty small, less than 1 to 2 grams on average, the kinetic energy the particle has due to its speed is the dominant factor in how bright it will appear. The flash we see from Earth is due to the tiny piece of debris transferring its energy to atmospheric atoms along its path as it travels through the thermosphere (the meteoric region lies about 50 to 75 miles in altitude). This long, thin column of excited atoms, the meteor trail, is usually less than several feet in diameter but can be dozens of miles long.

The best time to look for Perseids is after midnight into the early morning hours of Wednesday, August 12. The sky map above shows the location of the radiant at 1:00 AM MDT for our location here in Socorro, New Mexico. Not a night owl? No problem! You can start your search as soon as it gets dark; set yourself up in a comfy lounge chair, look toward the northwest, and you will likely catch a glimpse of a falling star.

M. Colleen Gino, MRO Assistant Director of Outreach and Communications

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Close Encounter of the Moon-Mars Kind

On Sunday, August 9, some fortunate folks in dozens of cities spread across South America will have the opportunity to witness a relatively rare occurrence as the planet Mars slips behind one side of the Moon and reappears on the other side about an hour-and-a-quarter later. In reality it’s not Mars playing hide and seek, the Moon is moving between us and Mars as it travels along its orbital path; this is known as a lunar occultation.

Lunar occultations of stars happen fairly frequently, but planetary lunar occultations are relatively few and far between. Unfortunately, those of us in the northern hemisphere won’t see this particular planetary occultation, but we will see a stunningly close encounter of the Moon and Mars with only about 1° separating the pair at our location in Socorro, New Mexico. The sky chart below shows this duo high in the sky toward the south about an hour before sunrise, but you can start observing any time after midnight Saturday night/Sunday morning. While you’re at it, you may catch a glimpse of a few Perseid meteors, which are heading toward their peak on August 11-12 (more on that later).

The next lunar occultation of Mars will occur on October 3, but once again it will only be visible at select locations in the southern hemisphere; we in the northern hemisphere will see another close encounter with about a 2° separation between the Moon and Mars. However, many of us in the southern US including parts of New Mexico, will be treated to a stellar lunar occultation on November 9 in the early morning hours, when the Moon will occult a star in the constellation Leo, Eta Leonis. For details on this and other stellar and planetary occultations, visit the International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA) website.

M. Colleen Gino, MRO Assistant Director of Outreach and Communications

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Link Me Up, Elon!

By this time, you’ve likely heard about the SpaceX Starlink satellites, if only due to the great concern being voiced by both professional and amateur astronomers that the night sky will never be the same. Over the next decade, Starlink plans to launch 12,000 satellites into low Earth orbit for the purpose of providing high-speed internet everywhere on Earth. That’s great news for those of us in rural areas like Socorro, New Mexico, who deal with incredibly poor internet service, but not-so-great news for those of us who observe the night sky.

Video of Starlink satellites from one of the first launches, taken by MROI staff member Dylan Etscorn. Click on the image to play the video.

Currently, there are 2,666 operational satellites orbiting the Earth (Union of Concerned Citizens). Anyone who has watched the night sky for long has likely seen a satellite or two passing overhead, and those of us who image the night sky will occasionally capture the streak of a satellite as it passes through the field of view. With an additional 12,000 satellites in orbit, the chances of a satellite photo-bombing one’s image increases dramatically. Add to that another 30,000 satellites, which SpaceX is in the process of getting approval for, and one begins to wonder if it will be possible to take an image without a satellite passing through. SpaceX/Starlink founder Elon Musk isn’t overly concerned with this prospect, as he is reported to be of the opinion that all astronomical observing should be done by orbiting telescopes anyway. Yo, love your forward thinking, dude! Can my beloved Takahashi refractor hitch a ride on one of your satellites by any chance?

Moreover, SpaceX isn’t the only company chasing the golden goose of providing global high-speed internet via satellites; OneWeb Satellites plans to deploy up to 900 satellites into low Earth orbit with the same goal, and Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is developing Project Kuiper, a constellation of 3,236 satellites for high-speed broadband connectivity. It could get pretty crowded up there!

SpaceX addressed the concern of Starlink satellites ruining astronomical imaging early on by using an experimental coating on one of the satellites to reduce its reflectivity, and a deployable sun visor on another satellite to block sunlight from reflecting off the antenna surfaces. All 58 satellites of the next batch, whose launch window starts tomorrow, August 7 at about 1 AM EDT, are equipped with the sun visor. Musk has shown at least some level of sensitivity to the concerns of the astronomical community about the negative impact that thousands of shiny satellites swarming above us will have on Earth-based observations.

At this point there are 538 Starlink satellites in orbit, soon to be 596 if tomorrow’s scheduled launch takes place as planned. This number is enough for Starlink to offer a beta version of its internet connectivity to the USA and Canada before the end of this year. Of course I signed up immediately upon hearing this news, but unfortunately the service will be only available to higher latitude locations in the US. You can sign up to be a beta tester on their website.

If you’re interested in trying to catch a glimpse of Starlink satellites, refer to the website Heavens Above. Here you can find visibility details on all of the satellites from all of the launches calculated for your location. The most interesting time to view them is within the first few days of launch, as they are still close together and appear as a string of lights in motion rather than a single point of light, as in the video above.

Love ’em or hate ’em, it looks like Starlink satellites are here to stay. While I might get a little cranky when I have to throw out a perfectly good astrophoto due to some unsightly streaks of unwanted light, the prospect of affordable high-speed internet availability is awfully appealing!

M. Colleen Gino, MRO Assistant Director of Outreach and Communications