Space mirrors could ruin astronomy — and your eyes

Space mirrors could ruin astronomy — and your eyes(theverge.com)

10 points by Brajeshwar 3 hours ago | 4 comments

Veedrac 8 minutes ago |

Roughly, these satellites would be as bright as the sun, except at night when you're adapted to dark conditions. With the naked eye it'd just be unpleasant, because the dot is so small and smears out to a lower effective brightness, but through a telescope it's bad enough you could get eye damage fairly quickly.

With Starlink, I thought the more extreme complaints were unreasonable — astronomy is important, but it's not so important that marginal costs are unpayable — but with Reflect Orbital we're talking about costs like 'it's sometimes uncomfortable to look at the night sky' where it's really hard to imagine a counterbalancing win.

sherburt3 2 hours ago |

4 times brighter than the moon doesn’t sound very dangerous.

cowboylowrez 1 hour ago | |

I'm betting these things are not going to be moonsized so accordingly thats loads of light focused into a pretty fine point. When you aim your telescope at the moon, you don't have to use much magnification to start cutting down the bulk of the light hitting your eyeball, zooming in on the satellite will have a much different profile here.

Ylpertnodi 1 hour ago | |

Unless you're a bug.