Starlink Launch

FFVII · 13-06-2020 9:33pm

webpal wrote: »

I've been looking for starlinks but am not having much luck. I follow astronomy Ireland on Twitter and their times are different to what findastarlink.com is telling me for my location. Which site do look at for accurate timings, with the naked eye.

If you put in proper location they all the same.

Use https://findstarlink.com/

webpal · 13-06-2020 9:57pm

FFVII wrote: »

If you put in proper location they all the same.

Use https://findstarlink.com/

Nearest location is Waterford which shows passes at 10:32 and 11:52 wheres astronomy Ireland is showing
11:55 and 12:11am

FFVII · 13-06-2020 10:01pm

webpal wrote: »

Nearest location is Waterford which shows passes at 10:32 and 11:52 wheres astronomy Ireland is showing
11:55 and 12:11am

I'm Midlands.

I won't be able to see it at all. Newest ones.

Where is astronomy Ireland based? Different than you anyway.

Use 10.32.

webpal · 13-06-2020 10:57pm

Their tweets dont say, at least findastarlink.com has coordinates so I'll go by that, thanks

dhaughton99 · 13-06-2020 10:58pm

Saturday 13th June

11:55pm see new STARLINKs(Jun.4 batch) in the South - about 50 of them, 10-15 seconds apart on average!!!

12:11am(Sunday) see STARLINKs (Apr.22 batch) almost overhead (1 every 20 seconds until 12:25am)

Muahahaha · 17-06-2020 10:36am

namloc1980 wrote: »

Subject to regulatory approval Spacex Starlink internet services should be available in the EU sometime in 2021.

Wonder how that will work if the EU give it approval. Is he giving it away for free at first to get people to sign up? Would imagine Sky/Virgin, etc will have something to say about that

namloc1980 · 17-06-2020 12:15pm

Muahahaha wrote: »

Wonder how that will work if the EU give it approval. Is he giving it away for free at first to get people to sign up? Would imagine Sky/Virgin, etc will have something to say about that

No idea of the costs at the moment but you need an external antenna/receiver of some kind to communicate with the satellites. Spacex are looking to operate it themselves in the US but may sub-license it out in Europe to various providers - this would probably make it more acceptable to the EU regulators from a competition point of view.

rameire · 17-06-2020 12:27pm

one I have used alot recently is james.darpinian.com
it provides a map of the earth based on your location and then a view from the ground up, and will provide times of starlink passing overhead.

iLikeWaffles · 17-06-2020 12:32pm

webpal wrote: »

I've been looking for starlinks but am not having much luck. I follow astronomy Ireland on Twitter and their times are different to what findastarlink.com is telling me for my location. Which site do look at for accurate timings, with the naked eye.

Astronomy Ireland times are estimated for Max and place you in central Ireland by default (so everyone in Ireland gets a chance to see them). If you visit HeavensAbove you'll get exact times down to the second based off your geo-location/IP.

You would want to be first looking for them in complete darkness, with absolutely no light sources in your view, that includes a phone screen (if you must look a a phone screen and happen to have an iPhone they have a colour filter that can be accessed to turn the screen red when you press the home button 3 times), light pollution plays a big role in how visible they are. I'm in a Bortle zone 9 and can see them but they are difficult to spot. The train was barely visible for me.

Class MayDresser · 17-06-2020 12:56pm

When's the first visible passing of those 58 launched last Saturday morning?

iLikeWaffles · 17-06-2020 1:30pm

Class MayDresser wrote: »

When's the first visible passing of those 58 launched last Saturday morning?

I don't think they are Visible here. #7 should be still visible (just about) but they'll be more spread out.

namloc1980 · 17-06-2020 5:59pm

The next Starlink is due to launch on Tuesday the 23rd June. Liftoff will be at 22:58 Irish time from Cape Canaveral, Florida and its trajectory will take it directly over Ireland about 20 minutes after launch. Hopefully we should get a great view of it as it passes over with a bit of luck.

iLikeWaffles · 18-06-2020 12:53am

namloc1980 wrote: »

The next Starlink is due to launch on Tuesday the 23rd June. Liftoff will be at 22:58 Irish time from Cape Canaveral, Florida and its trajectory will take it directly over Ireland about 20 minutes after launch. Hopefully we should get a great view of it as it passes over with a bit of luck.

Saw the previous one #7 blazing across the sky, extremely bright! Definitely worth a look if it will be visible.

Class MayDresser · 18-06-2020 1:01am

That was class, the night was perfect for it. The Moon that night!

Capt'n Midnight · 18-06-2020 1:07am

Muahahaha wrote: »

Wonder how that will work if the EU give it approval. Is he giving it away for free at first to get people to sign up? Would imagine Sky/Virgin, etc will have something to say about that

Guestimated costs are $100-$300 for kit and $80 per month.

If SpaceX can demonstrate a working network with sub 100ms latency by the end of next month then they can apply for some of the $16Bn funding for rural BB in the US over the next 10 years.

And lots of other countries are planning to spend billions on rural BB over the next few years.

In theory trans Atlantic connections could be faster than fibre optic cables and in stock markets speed matters.

Messi19 · 18-06-2020 1:43pm

iLikeWaffles wrote: »

Saw the previous one #7 blazing across the sky, extremely bright! Definitely worth a look if it will be visible.

Was that the pulsing light at about 2am a couple weeks back?

jArgHA · 18-06-2020 3:42pm

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Guestimated costs are $100-$300 for kit and $80 per month.

If SpaceX can demonstrate a working network with sub 100ms latency by the end of next month then they can apply for some of the $16Bn funding for rural BB in the US over the next 10 years.

And lots of other countries are planning to spend billions on rural BB over the next few years.

In theory trans Atlantic connections could be faster than fibre optic cables and in stock markets speed matters.

This is going to be a right pain in the backside when it comes to astrophotography.

FFVII · 18-06-2020 3:58pm

jArgHA wrote: »

This is going to be a right pain in the backside when it comes to astrophotography.

Yea, tbh, something is probably gonna have to done to stop this.

The novelty will wear off pretty quick. Their supposed to be sending up 40,000 of them and Bezos will probably do the same.

Muahahaha · 18-06-2020 5:14pm

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Guestimated costs are $100-$300 for kit and $80 per month.

Ok right, I had thought that he was doing this to bring cheap internet to the world but its not so cheap at those prices. Whats his angle here, is it purely based on broadband speeds or is he doing it because satellites would actually end up working out a lot cheaper than laying fibre everywhere?

iLikeWaffles · 18-06-2020 9:15pm

Messi19 wrote: »

Was that the pulsing light at about 2am a couple weeks back?

Doesn't pulse at all, it was a steady light across the sky. Most likely reflecting a ray from the Sun onto a cloud.

SlowBlowin · 18-06-2020 9:44pm

I see Starlink have opened a mailing list for the public Beta, I have just signed up. Its open to higher latitudes first, so this includes Ireland, starts second half of 2020...

Starlink is the cheapest, high bandwidth, solution for my location. At the moment I pay 60 per month and get 5mbs down and 0.5 mbs up, I also had to pay for the radio gear upfront, so not a dissimilar situation to Starlink.

Muahahaha · 18-06-2020 9:54pm

dhaughton99 wrote: »

Saturday 13th June

11:55pm see new STARLINKs(Jun.4 batch) in the South - about 50 of them, 10-15 seconds apart on average!!!

12:11am(Sunday) see STARLINKs (Apr.22 batch) almost overhead (1 every 20 seconds until 12:25am)

Im looking forward to this but the weather may not play ball. Fair bit of rain forecast for Saturday, hopefully it will pass through before midnight arrives

SlowBlowin · 18-06-2020 9:55pm

Messi19 wrote: »

Was that the pulsing light at about 2am a couple weeks back?

It did "pulse" on the first pass, when the fairings were off the rockets and it was spinning up for release of the sats. If this launch profile is the same then you might well see the same light pulsing, which I believe comes from the rotating stack of satellites. Its a bright light, and the pulsing was just maybe 10 - 15 % reduction.

Capt'n Midnight · 18-06-2020 11:48pm

Muahahaha wrote: »

Ok right, I had thought that he was doing this to bring cheap internet to the world but its not so cheap at those prices. Whats his angle here, is it purely based on broadband speeds or is he doing it because satellites would actually end up working out a lot cheaper than laying fibre everywhere?

couple of angles.

It's not competing with Fibre to the home or cabinet or "fibre powered" broadband or anyone who can see a 5G mast.
It's competing with DSL over long lines and ISDN and crappy mobile signals for anyone out in the Styx

Iridium made $523 in 2018 from a network with just 66 satellites and dialup and voice on a per minute. Globalstar , Inmarsat , SES/Astra and others are also making money so there is a market even if they don't sell mass broadband.

Light travels 30% slower through a fibre optic cable than through free space.
IF they can get packets between London or Frankfurt to New York or Chicago faster then a LEO outfit bouncing signals between satellites could charge the stock market lots.

It makes for an interesting JCB proof backup connection. And critters can't eat cables where there aren't any.

SpaceX have an income of €2Bn a year on launching satellites.
The national broadband plan in Ireland alone is €3Bn, on top of what the punters pay.

What they are offering is decent speeds everywhere, soon, with an actual network that's in place now.
Other constellations are rolling out too but Amazon are considered evil by some and Oneweb is bankrupt.

5G is no use unless you can practically see the mast.

Ilyushin76 · 19-06-2020 11:12am

Muahahaha wrote: »

Im looking forward to this but the weather may not play ball. Fair bit of rain forecast for Saturday, hopefully it will pass through before midnight arrives

Was that not last Saturday ?

Muahahaha · 20-06-2020 6:35pm

Balls it was last Saturday, got my dates mixed up

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

couple of angles.

It's not competing with Fibre to the home or cabinet or "fibre powered" broadband or anyone who can see a 5G mast.
It's competing with DSL over long lines and ISDN and crappy mobile signals for anyone out in the Styx

Iridium made $523 in 2018 from a network with just 66 satellites and dialup and voice on a per minute. Globalstar , Inmarsat , SES/Astra and others are also making money so there is a market even if they don't sell mass broadband.

Light travels 30% slower through a fibre optic cable than through free space.
IF they can get packets between London or Frankfurt to New York or Chicago faster then a LEO outfit bouncing signals between satellites could charge the stock market lots.

It makes for an interesting JCB proof backup connection. And critters can't eat cables where there aren't any.

SpaceX have an income of €2Bn a year on launching satellites.
The national broadband plan in Ireland alone is €3Bn, on top of what the punters pay.

What they are offering is decent speeds everywhere, soon, with an actual network that's in place now.
Other constellations are rolling out too but Amazon are considered evil by some and Oneweb is bankrupt.

5G is no use unless you can practically see the mast.

Thanks Captain. So it can provide decent speeds but still not as fast as fibre to the home. Does that mean Musks main target market for this is the developing world or could it be of good use in rural areas of Europe/north America?

On Iridum did you mean $523m?

Capt'n Midnight · 20-06-2020 7:39pm

Muahahaha wrote: »

Balls it was last Saturday, got my dates mixed up

Thanks Captain. So it can provide decent speeds but still not as fast as fibre to the home. Does that mean Musks main target market for this is the developing world or could it be of good use in rural areas of Europe/north America?

On Iridum did you mean $523m?

yes Iridium got half a billion

Fibre is the good stuff because you can use more colours to increase bandwidth.

we achieve ultra-high data transmission over 75 km of standard optical fibre using a single integrated chip source. We demonstrate a line rate of 44.2 Terabits/s

Though on the real world field test the achievable bandwidth was only 39,000 GB/s. So it would take about one and a half seconds to fill a 12 TB drive.

Then again by using a multicore fibre they are aiming for 0.66 Petabits/s.

To get low latency you need low earth orbit. And that means doing an orbit in a little over an hour and a half. So you have to lots of satellites because each will only spend a short time above any location.

http://www.circleid.com/posts/20191106_what_to_expect_from_spacex_starlink_broadband_service/

Each orbital plane will have 66 satellites at an inclination of 53 degrees and an altitude of 550 km.
...
With six orbital planes, there will be continuous connectivity in the northern US and Canada and much of western Europe and Russia, but only southern Patagonia and the South Island of New Zealand in the sparsely populated south

...
With 12 orbital planes, all of the continental US and most of Europe, the Middle East, China, Japan, and Korea will be covered. Shotwell says that once they have 1,200 satellites in orbit, they will have global coverage (with the exception of the polar regions)

Capt'n Midnight · 21-06-2020 8:39pm

Muahahaha wrote: »

Balls it was last Saturday, got my dates mixed up

https://spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/

June 23 Falcon 9 • Starlink 9/BlackSky Global 5 & 6
Launch time: 2158 GMT (5:58 p.m. EDT)
Launch site: LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is expected to launch the tenth batch of approximately 60 satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network, a mission designated Starlink 9. Two Earth observation microsatellites for BlackSky Global, a Seattle-based company, will launch as rideshare payloads on this mission. Moved forward from June 24.

namloc1980 · 22-06-2020 7:19pm

Starlink 9 launch delayed until the 25th.

FFVII · 22-06-2020 7:39pm

namloc1980 wrote: »

Starlink 9 launch delayed until the 25th.

Where you see that?

Not on space X twitter, musk twitter or any news site.

namloc1980 · 22-06-2020 8:01pm

FFVII wrote: »

Where you see that?

Not on space X twitter, musk twitter or any news site.

https://spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/

Spacex will confirm new time asap.

Official launch forecast has the window opening at 16:34 local time (21:34 Irish time) on Thursday.

.

FFVII · 22-06-2020 8:12pm

Gracious

namloc1980 · 25-06-2020 2:41pm

Delayed until tomorrow

.

FFVII · 25-06-2020 3:36pm

namloc1980 wrote: »

Delayed until tomorrow

.

With the weather we are meant to get later, no harm.

namloc1980 · 26-06-2020 4:43pm

Launch scheduled for 21:18 this evening Irish time. It'll be directly over Ireland about 20 mins after launch. Shame about the weather and the thick cloud over most of the country.

Tr_18 · 26-06-2020 4:45pm

Will they be live streaming it again?

Class MayDresser · 26-06-2020 5:03pm

Tr_18 wrote: »

Will they be live streaming it again?

On SpaceX 's YouTube page. Not a chance of seeing it here in North Cork.

namloc1980 · 26-06-2020 8:43pm

Launch postponed. Not weather related.

.

Class MayDresser · 26-06-2020 8:48pm

29th of June on their YT page.

Class MayDresser · 07-07-2020 8:13pm

Did it go ahead at 5 today? Can't see anything, very quiet recently.

Capt'n Midnight · 07-07-2020 9:43pm

Class MayDresser wrote: »

Did it go ahead at 5 today? Can't see anything, very quiet recently.

https://spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/

July 8Falcon 9 • Starlink 9/BlackSky Global
Launch time: 1559 GMT (11:59 a.m. EDT)
Launch site: LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is expected to launch the tenth batch of approximately 60 satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network, a mission designated Starlink 9. Two Earth observation microsatellites for BlackSky Global, a Seattle-based company, will launch as rideshare payloads on this mission. Moved forward from June 24. Delayed from June 23, June 25 and June 26. [June 30]

upupup · 07-07-2020 9:48pm

Hope it launches tomorrow as we have clear skies for thursday night/friday morning passes(thats if it is flying over ireland)

namloc1980 · 08-07-2020 4:55pm

upupup wrote: »

Hope it launches tomorrow as we have clear skies for thursday night/friday morning passes(thats if it is flying over ireland)

Scrubbed for to weather.

upupup · 08-07-2020 5:13pm

The last launch is passing over tomorrow night @22.40,magnitude 2.9.they are still close together so it may look like a train.

Class MayDresser · 10-07-2020 9:16pm

Nothing last night, high cloud cover. Myself and my 8 year old lying on the road saw two token satellites. Nothing worth looking out for tonight going by that Heavens Above app, all mag 2.8 plus??

Capt'n Midnight · 02-08-2020 1:47am

Amazon gets green-light to blow $10bn on 3,000+ internet satellites. All so Americans can shop more on Amazon

The constellation will orbit between 590 and 630 kilometres above the surface of the Earth, and according the FCC will use the frequencies 17.7-18.6GHz for space-to-Earth, 18.8-20.2GHz also for space-to-Earth, and 27.5-30.0 GHz for Earth-to-space.

Higher than Starlink so 30? years for orbit to decay naturally rather than 1 year for Starlink

iLikeWaffles · 02-08-2020 3:44am

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Amazon gets green-light to blow $10bn on 3,000+ internet satellites. All so Americans can shop more on Amazon

Higher than Starlink so 30? years for orbit to decay naturally rather than 1 year for Starlink

I wonder was the current global situation an influencing factor for their approval. Not that it will make much of a difference in heavily light polluted areas anyway but more of them will be even more of a nuisance for astronomy and astro-imaging on Earth.

Muahahaha · 02-08-2020 4:47pm

What way are these satellites effecting astronomy and photography? Is it that the brightness of them is making other stuff invisible or something. And is the effect not just a for a moment as the satellite flys through at high speed?

iLikeWaffles · 02-08-2020 5:44pm

Muahahaha wrote: »

What way are these satellites effecting astronomy and photography? Is it that the brightness of them is making other stuff invisible or something. And is the effect not just a for a moment as the satellite flys through at high speed?

The brightness wouldn't block out other stuff and if it did then there would be a bigger problem, anything that bright in the night sky would be causing the ground to light up also which would be a major environmental issue. Most but not all astrophotography requires you to stack many images together, if you have 3000 Amazon satellites to contend with (that number is just the start) and another 40,000 that SpaceX want to eventually send up then that is a lot of frames ruined and time wasted were you set out to capture a distant Galaxy, Nebula or Cluster.

They'll be orbiting in a grid which means that every x amount of seconds you will most likely capture/see one of these passing your field of view. When you are exposing for longer periods (say 5 minutes) you'll potentially have many of these things in those exposures. It will be kind of like going to a match where the stadium was built on train tracks and every 5 minutes a train passes through which interrupts play.

Muahahaha · 02-08-2020 6:17pm

ah right thanks, hadnt realised astro photography means long exposures but that makes a lot of sense. Yeah I could see how that could be annoying running a five minute exposure and then you've satellites flying through the picture. I presume that when the image is stacked the satellites them come out as long streaks as they pass through the frame?

Also is Musks promise to paint them black going to make any difference to the problem or is it all just window dressing?

Starlink Launch

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