The Impact of Satellites for astronomers.

As a regular stargazer and amateur astronomer, I have noticed a large increase in the amount of satellites I see a night. Some of them you can see easily with the naked eye and some can only be viewed through a telescope. These mega-constellations of satellites do prove exceptionally useful, used for weather predictions, broadcasting and communication, with increasing amounts of satellites entering low-earth orbit, they are becoming growing issue for astronomers who are finding the bright lights are disrupting observatories and telescopes, the streaks and flashes of reflected light that can also interfere with wide-field survey observations; the background sky glow adding to an already light polluted sky, from the satellites reflecting light and other issues associated with debris in space and the increasing risk of collisions as low Earth orbits become more crowded. Researchers looked at Hubble Space Telescope images taken between 2002 and 2021. The researchers found that a fraction of 2.7% of the individual exposures with a typical exposure time of 11 minutes are crossed by satellites and that the fraction of satellite trails in the images increases “Some astronomers see this as a true 'hair on fire' emergency, heralding irretrievable losses to space science; others present a more sanguine face, depicting this as yet another challenge to be surmounted in surveying a decreasingly pristine sky," remarks David Koplow, the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. Although our need to stay connected is now greater than ever, I don’t personally believe that we should be sacrificing our skies, for the commercial gain of tech-giants like Elon Musk.