I remember looking up to the night sky 40 plus years ago and being in awe of seeing 2 or 3 Satellites pass overhead in an hour.
Last night I was in the Aussie bush, 100 km from Perth, stargazing.
What astounded me was the number of satellites I saw. Considering I could see 180 degrees of the sky, I never looked south or west, 21 satellites passed my field of vision in approximately 30 minutes.
At least 3 times I would see 3 satellites at the one time.
I remember when there was just one! I went out one summer evening in the early 1960s to look for Telstar 1. It had just been launched and I was so excited to catch a glimpse of it as it passed overhead (though fairly low on the horizon).
At the time I was working as an apprentice at Tolsford Hill Radio Station where later we would take the first live trans-Atlantic broadcast on its way from Spain (as I recall) to the BBC in London.
The signal was perfect as it passed through our station but the BBC decided that no one would believe it was live from the USA so they degraded the signal. Telstar was not geostationary so a broadcast was limited to something like 10 minutes before it disappeared over the horizon.
Wow, great experience and memory there.
I always find it amazing how many stars and planets there are.
There is nothing more rewarding than looking up at them and when you see shooting stars it just makes my day.
I also remember Telstar being launched Bruce, I was 10 years old at the time. Fascinating and worrying to think that the Beeb would degrade the the signal. It makes you think what else is the establishment is hiding from us…
One of my favorite nighttime experiences as a kid was when my parents would spread out blankets in the backyard, and we would look for meteors and satellites. All the while, my mom and dad would teach us how to identify constellations, learn about the moon and planets, and ultimately, we chose our own star. Mine ended up being Sirius, the Dog Star, that I thought I had discovered on my own. Leave it to my parents to hold on to that belief .
This is an image of the current active satellites in orange and inactive satellites in aqua. The vast majority of active satellites are for communication. It looks a lot like a rush hour highway, doesn’t it!
If you go to this website, you can also see other objects orbiting around us:
That picture is slightly misleading in that the satellites as shown would be the size of a very large city on that scale, there is a lot of space up there.
As Douglas Adams once said, “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
It’s waaaay off scale, but it definitely shows that we spend too much time on our phones and internet .