this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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I started doing amateur astrophotography last year with a camera, lens and startracker.
The way it works is you take dozens or hundreds of photos of the same thing, then combine them into one final image, a process called "stacking".
To gather faint light, each photo is a long exposure gathering light for 30 - 120 seconds.
I have therefore taken over 20.000 long exposure shots of the night sky, pointing at different things, using wider and narrower lenses and NOT ONE SINGLE CLICK came without a Starlink streaking across the frame.
I'm a nobody using my phone to take the occasional image stack using Google's "night sight" mode on my Pixel 7 Pro. Out of the 30 or so pictures I've taken, one has a Starlink Trail.
Not necessarily a "starlink trail" you took a photo of a satellite, could be starlink could be something else. Also the astrophotography mode on the pixels is purdy cool and fun to mess around with
I saw it with my eyes. It was without a doubt a string of 9 Starlink satellites. If you look closely, the image is a composite of multiple trails in a nearly colinear path.
What focal length do you normally shoot at? My rig is at 610mm and I get satellite trails mostly around dusk/dawn, but they all get rejected out during stacking
12/35mm for wide / nightscape shots, 135mm for regular wide field and 500mm for deep sky-ish stuff.
My sensor is APS-C, so the "effective" focal length is 1.5x the above lens values
Thatβs fucking crazy, especially to think this wasnβt even a problem (on the same scale) more than 5 years ago.
It is crazy, and as I said in another comment this is going to be exponential. We will have many mega constellations like starlink in the next decade.
Yeah, sadly this has become normal. The polution rate has reached ~100%. And sure, you already artificially build the final image anyways, but with Starlink, this has become a necessity. You can no longer take any individual shots, as they're all just Starlink streaks.
That's actually incredibly sad. Damn.
What other objects interfered? The ISS i assume.
The ISS is visible from any single point you're standing on for up to about a minute when passing directly overhead and then the next orbit isn't close enough for you to see.
Some comm and weather sats here and there but really nothing crazy. It was even fun to have individual shots with a streak on it cause it was a relatively rare occasion.
Now there's just no hiding from it. Yes, the process of stacking images averages out the streaks in the final image, but for the average person with a wide lens taking a milky way shot during summer camping it's basically impossible to not have like 5 streaks on it.
Damn :(