Derek Wallentinsen stood atop Inscription Rock in El Morro National Monument on the night of May 23, 2019, taking photographs of the star-filled sky to document the darkness.
A ranger at the time, he was working to get El Morro certified as an International Dark Sky Park, a designation the site 56 miles southeast of Gallup would attain later that year.
Perched on the 200-foot sandstone promontory that has had more than 2,000 inscriptions and petroglyphs from many cultures carved on its cliff face through the centuries, Wallentinsen noticed a bright spot streaking across the sky.
“At first, I thought it was an airplane,” Wallentinsen said. “Later on, I put the pieces together after reading on the internet that it was the first launch of a Starlink group that I was seeing.”
Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet company, has dominated a new space race in the six years since that initial launch of 60 satellites on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. With recent launches this month, there are now more than 8,000 Starlink satellites in Earth’s orbit. That accounts for nearly two-thirds of all active satellites, according to a website maintained by astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell.
A screenshot of a map showing more than 8,000 Starlink satellites in orbit.
Screenshot from satellitemap.space
In an October filing with the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX requested permission to deploy 29,988 Starlink satellites to expand its coverage. Amazon and other companies in China and Europe are also looking to become players in the satellite internet industry and deploy their own constellations. Forecasters predict anywhere from 27,000 to 70,000 low Earth orbit satellites will be launched in the next five years.
The rapid increase in the number of satellites has raised concern for many in the astronomy community across the planet, including with professional and amateur astronomers in New Mexico.
Satellites reflect sunlight and can impact astronomical observations. They can also cause interference with radio astronomy.
An international team of researchers released a paper in 2021 that suggested solar reflections off space debris and the megaconstellations of satellites that are projected to be deployed in the coming years could significantly raise the level of light pollution and alter the visual experience of the night sky across much of the globe.
Wallentinsen, who serves on the state council of New Mexico’s Dark Sky International chapter, said the recent proliferation of satellites has created a new reality for astronomy and an uneasy future.
“I was raised when the first satellites were being launched, and it was kind of a thrill to see them because it was so unusual in those days,” Wallentinsen said. “But nowadays it’s a problem and flipped from something that’s a novelty to something that’s a nuisance or worse.
“It is a significant issue. Anybody who does astronomy is aware of it.”
The streaks of Starlink satellites pass in front of star trails near Carson National Forest in New Mexico in a long exposure photographed soon after launch.
Mike Lewinski/Creative Commons attribution
Rick Fienberg also watched the first Starlink launch in 2019. He was in his backyard in New Hampshire and was expecting to see the train of lights. Others weren’t, and he said people were calling 911 that night to report UFO sightings.
The former editor and chief of Sky & Telescope magazine, Fienberg was serving as press officer for the American Astronomical Society — the professional organization for astronomers in the U.S. — at the time of the first launch. Although astronomers anticipated the launch, Fienberg said they weren’t expecting it to appear so bright in the sky.
The AAS put out a statement the following month to express its concern over the impacts on astronomy by satellite constellations and note a desire to work with relevant parties to minimize the impacts.
“The problem now is there’s a multiplying number of companies launching these things,” Fienberg said. “And there are no formal regulations for visual brightness of satellites.”
Astronomers immediately reached out to SpaceX after the first launch, and the company agreed to meet with astronomy professionals to work toward figuring out ways to mitigate the satellites’ brightness.
“They came up with different approaches,” Fienberg said. “Some of them involve more actively manipulating the satellites’ orientation so they don’t reflect as much light down to the ground. They included some attempts to darken the satellites. These have resulted in dimming the satellites somewhat, but from the perspective of anyone who goes out to admire the night sky, you really would like those satellites to be faint enough so that once they reach their operational orbits, they’re no longer visible to the unaided eye. But they haven’t achieved that yet.”
The background image shows the double star Albireo in Cygnus and was taken on December 26, 2019. Two out of 10 2.5-minute exposures recorded Starlink satellites moving across the field.
Rafael Schmall/NOIRLab
Since one company is launching the bulk of the satellites right now, Fienberg said it’s possible to maintain dialogue to try to work toward improvements. As more and more companies around the world launch their own satellite constellations, negotiations become much more challenging, which he said makes international regulations a desired objective.
There is also the concern of satellites crashing into each other and the resulting space debris creating a cascade of collisions in low Earth orbit, a scenario known as the Kessler effect.
The International Astronomical Union created the Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference in 2022 to bring together astronomers, satellite operators, policymakers and the wider community to coordinate efforts to protect skies from satellite interference. Last year, it released a draft of recommendations and a paper to describe its policy positions.
Satellites appear brighter when first launched because they are very low. As they rise into their orbits, they become fainter since they are farther away. They are most visible shortly after sunset or before sunrise when they catch the reflection of the sun but the ground is in darkness. When the satellites are in Earth’s shadow at night, they become less visible.
While the satellites can be seen at times with the naked eye, the average person may rarely notice them unless they’re looking for them. But Fienberg, a member of The Albuquerque Astronomical Society who is building a backyard observatory in Placitas, said astronomers and astrophotographers can’t stop seeing them.
Most telescopes have a finderscope that has a wider field of view to help zero in on a general area of the sky before looking at a much narrower field of view with the telescope, Fienberg explained. The telescope field of view may be smaller than the size of one moon.
Several years ago, Fienberg said he would sometimes see a satellite through the finderscope field, but never through the telescope field. Now, he says there are so many satellites that he regularly sees them pass through his telescope field of view.
“It’s not causing anybody any illness or any bad effects,” Fienberg said. “Mainly, it’s just distracting. It’s like a swarm of insects; you want to swat them away.”
Tony Bonanno is a professional photographer and former National Park Service chief ranger for the Rocky Mountain and Southwest regions. A member of the Santa Fe Stargazers who has lived in Eldorado for the past 32 years, he got into astrophotography during the coronavirus pandemic.
He was attempting to photograph a pair of galaxies last month when streaks from 26 satellites of a Starlink launch happened to cut across his field of view.
A train of 26 Starlink satellites passes through the frame as galaxies M81 and M82 can be seen in the photograph taken June 8, the day of launch for the satellites.
Courtesy Tony Bonanno
Bonanno says astrophotographers frequently stack multiple shorter exposures together in photo editing software to create a longer exposure. Some of the exposures may need to be thrown out if they contain satellite trails to create a cleaner final product.
While Bonanno and others in the local astronomy community expressed annoyance with the increasing prevalence of satellites, they said they see the benefit of the technology for things like helping provide internet to remote areas and regions impacted by natural disasters.
“There’s no question that a lot of these satellites are really enhancing our quality of life in many ways, so we have to understand that there are several sides to the story,” Bonanno said.
“But for astrophotographers to say ‘We don’t care about satellites; we’ve got the tools to fix that in our images,’ well, astrophotographers are only one demographic viewing the night sky.”
Bonanno noted that humans throughout history have derived meaning and had close connections with the night sky. He expressed concern with the cultural heritage of the night sky being threatened by megaconstellations of satellites.
“I love taking photographs of deep-sky objects. It shows me so much, and I feel like I learn so much,” Bonanno said. “I’ve been able to manage, even with the hardware flying around. But I do have a concern about how much is too much around our planet.”
Fienberg said the telescope most at risk by megaconstellations is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
The newly completed observatory cost more than $800 million and took a decade to construct. Its 8.4-meter telescope has the largest digital camera ever built.
Fienberg said the point of the observatory is to look for changes in space and detect supernovas, comets, asteroids and more. But the telescope’s field of view is massive, and its images will be scarred by satellite streaks.
“So if you get a streak running through an image, especially if you get a bunch of streaks, those streaks cover a significant part of the image and anything that might have been behind that satellite will not show up in your image. So maybe you miss something, or you at least have a gap in your data,” Fienberg said. “When you spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build a telescope, the last thing you want is to have to keep retaking data because your data has been messed up by artificial satellites.”
Starlink satellite trails pass in front of Comet 13P/Olbers, photographed in July of 2024 from Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.
Courtesy Derek Wallentinsen
While New Mexico’s dark sky advocates don’t seem confident that any meaningful regulation regarding satellites will take place in the near future, they said the new nuisance won’t stop them from enjoying the state’s excellent stargazing opportunities.
Just six years past the first Starlink launch, they expressed hope that further advancements will help ease the light pollution created by the inevitable influx of satellites in orbit.
“They haven’t achieved making them fainter than the dimmest naked eye stars that we can see, but they haven’t tried everything yet,” Fienberg said. “A species that’s clever enough to come up with these technologies is also clever enough to mitigate their unwanted effects.”