Astronomers find growing number of Starlink satellite tracks

This broad field of view, unfortunately, also increases the likelihood that an exposure will have a Starlink satellite in view.To determine how often the presence of these satellites was picked up by the ZTF cameras, the team behind the new analysis took data on the orbits of all Starlink hardware and compared it to the area of the sky captured in every archival ZTF image. And once there were over 1,500 Starlink satellites in orbit, the ZTF would commonly image over 200 in a 10-day period.Twilight observations were especially affected due to the confluence of two factors. SpaceX already has approval to increase the number of Starlink satellites to well over 10,000; the authors estimate that at 10,000, every image at twilight will likely contain a Starlink track. SpaceX has indicated it would eventually like to boost the numbers to over 40,000 satellites, at which point all twilight images are likely to have four tracks.And SpaceX isn't the only company planning on this sort of satellite service.