re space marketing would be wonderfull fcrary ucsu colorado edu frank crary writes while i m sure sagan considers it sacrilegious that wouldn t be because of his doubtfull credibility as an astronomer modern ground based visible light astronomy what these proposed orbiting billboards would upset is already a dying field the opacity and distortions caused by the atmosphere itself have driven most of the field to use radio far infrared or space based telescopes hardly the keck telescope in hawaii has taken its first pictures they re nearly as good as hubble for a tiny fraction of the cost in any case a bright point of light passing through the field doesn t ruin observations if that were the case the thousands of existing satellites would have already done so satelliets might not seem so bright to the eyes but as far as astronomy is concerned they are extremely bright i believe that this orbiting space junk will be far brighter still more like the full moon the moon upsets deep sky observation all over the sky and not just looking at it because of scattered light this is a known problem but of course two weeks out of every four are ok what happens when this billboard circles every minutes what would be a good time then frank crary cu boulder matt kennel mbk inls ucsd edu institute for nonlinear science university of california san diego ad archive for nonlinear dynamics papers programs ftp to lyapunov ucsd edu username anonymous
