If you’re in dark skies and look up, you’re certain to see a satellite. Lots of them. But how can you know which one you’re seeing, and how can you improve your chances of a sighting? Today we’ll talk about how to see satellites, or avoid seeing them.

Transcript

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Fraser Cain [00:01:42] Astronomy Cast Episode 673. How to see satellites or avoid them. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, your weekly facts based journey through the cosmos. We help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we don’t. I’m Fraser Cain, the publisher of Universe Today. With me is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. What are you doing?

Pamela Gay [00:02:02] I am doing well, I. I appear to be spending my day amused at the antics of artificial intelligence, and I feel like I need to do a PSA that if you have that new Samsung phone with the 100 X and you taken imaging for the moon, it’s not actually the moon that you photographed. It’s it’s. Well, you did photograph the moon and now it’s giving you somebody else’s picture of the moon because that’s how Samsung’s AI is rocking.

Fraser Cain [00:02:30] Now is that true? Yeah, because I’ve.

Pamela Gay [00:02:34] Heard I’ve.

Fraser Cain [00:02:35] Heard that that confirmation is also suspect. So like like press photos sharing to show what the moon looks like. I mean, the impression I get is that it’s doing I upscaling on your pictures, so might just be somebody else’s picture, but it is attempting to upscale the picture that you’ve taken.

Pamela Gay [00:02:57] So the the test that was done, I was someone downloaded a picture of the moon, degraded it, blurred it out and displayed it on a monitor, and then took a picture of what they displayed on the monitor. And the phone came back with something that was, containing information that was not in the original picture.

Fraser Cain [00:03:21] Yeah, that sounds like upscale AI upscaling to me. In my. And they do that. I mean they smooth out your image. They smooth out your picture.

Pamela Gay [00:03:30] Within an added resolution.

Fraser Cain [00:03:32] Yeah. Yeah. That’s that’s what the upscaling is right for. It’s Photoshop. So that’s my like people want better pictures and I mean like the my phone my Google phone totally messes with the shadows in the light areas to try and balance the picture. It’ll remove wrinkles on your face. So we’re deeply into this world where the pictures that you take are, are the pictures that you want, not the pictures that you took. I think this is where we’re getting to with all this kind of stuff.

Pamela Gay [00:04:07] I don’t like this. This is not the future I requested.

Fraser Cain [00:04:11] Which just use a dSLR. Then I do. Perfect. Well, then don’t worry about it. Okay? And then everyone else can use their bold glamor filter on TikTok and their teenage view. The teenage version of themselves. All right, so if you’re in dark skies and you look up, you’re certain to see a satellite. Lots of them. But how can you know which one you’re seeing? And how can you improve your chances of a sighting? Today we’re gonna talk about how to see satellites or avoid seeing them. I, I am ambivalent today.

Pamela Gay [00:04:45] Because that’s so unlike you.

Fraser Cain [00:04:48] I know, I know, I have so much joy, so much happiness seeing satellites in my as a child and through. Even now I go outside, I look up, I see a satellite. I’m like, cool. Yeah, space.

Pamela Gay [00:05:03] Yeah, right.

Fraser Cain [00:05:03] That’s that could be the enterprise passing over. But then on the other hand, we know this more and more and more of them, and they are going to be making our axis of space harder.

Pamela Gay [00:05:16] When, when was the last time you went out and just, like, spent a night in either a hammock or a lawn chair or, God forbid, actually lying on the ground where there are spiders and just looking at the sky the entire night.

Fraser Cain [00:05:30] A couple, a couple of years to do, like the whole night. Like I’ll definitely even now I’ll go outside just. And if it’s clear skies because they’re so rare here, let’s go to Canada this time of year. I go outside and I’m like, oh, it’s clear. And then we’ll go outside and we’ll bundle up and we’ll just watch the sky for as long as we can handle it. But yeah, it’s been a couple of years for just going outside, laying down under the stars. And I usually pass out in a couple of hours though, so I’m not I’m not built for this.

Pamela Gay [00:05:57] Yeah, I, I lost one out about a year and a half ago. And so, so. The the constellations of satellites were in full swing. We we had Starlink was starting to function and going outside and looking up, trying to see a meteor shower in Illinois was a matter of look. Oh, shoot, because it was either a satellite or a lightning bug. Most of the time.

Fraser Cain [00:06:30] That we don’t have, that would be awesome.

Pamela Gay [00:06:34] The lightning bugs were truly awesome, but the satellites initially had the exact same feeling as you, and like one of my most powerful memories of Dark Skies was sitting out on a big old rock at the base of a glacier when I was a high schooler and got to go glacier climbing and just watching satellites. I had never seen them before. And and so this was like what it meant to be someplace truly dark, as you could see, satellites. And now it’s like, No, they’re just they’re they’re just a lot of them there. Right.

Fraser Cain [00:07:12] So so like describe the experience then if you’re outside, it’s a warm summer night. You’re lying in the hammock, you’re looking up, the sky is clear, the mosquitoes are strangely absent. You are.

Pamela Gay [00:07:25] Just enjoying going.

Fraser Cain [00:07:26] To happen. I know, I know, you’re just enjoying the night sky. What? And you notice the satellite? What? What will you see in the sky?

Pamela Gay [00:07:37] In general, most satellites that you’re able to see are like some of the fainter stars, and it looks like a tiny star is is moving across the sky. And one of the fascinating things is close to twilight will make it horizon to horizon. But as it gets later and later, you can start to tell when they’re entering the shadow of the earth because they’ll be going along, going along no more. And and so there’s that. First of all, you have to ask yourself, is it a plane? And the speeds and the solidness of the color, or the fact that it’s blinking from white to not to white tonight? Yeah.

Fraser Cain [00:08:20] You see the blinking green light, if that’s.

Pamela Gay [00:08:23] An airplane, if it’s.

Fraser Cain [00:08:24] An airplane, any kind of blinking light that tells you this is an airplane.

Pamela Gay [00:08:29] And with the satellites, it’s going to be sunlight getting reflected back to you. So occasionally there’ll be a tumbling satellite and I. Those you will see variations in brightness, but it’s still the color of the sun light getting reflected back to you the entire time. Now that going across the sky and turning off. One of the fascinating things is if you’re out there and you’re just taking in the entire sky, you can actually tell the different satellites are at different orbits, because the ones that are in lower orbits will start hitting the shadow earlier than the ones that are in higher orbits. And if something’s in a large enough orbit, it’s not going to actually land itself into the shadow of the Earth. And so you can continue watching it throughout the night.

Fraser Cain [00:09:20] Well, that sort of led into what was going to be my next question, which i...