Alejandro S. Borlaff

Well, I'm glad that we extrapolated our results up to one million satellites.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I've updated my megaconstellations list www.planet4589.org/space/con/co... with details of the planned Blue Origin Terawave system and the enormous CTC1 and CTC2 constellations China just filed with the ITU, for a total of almost 750,000 proposed satellites in the years to come.

In fact, not only is it journals who should be checking the submitted papers for hallucinated citations: finding one should mean it gets sent back to the authors *before* contacting any potential referees about that submission.
🧪

🔭✨A mysterious iron ‘bar’ has been discovered in the Ring Nebula.

Using the new #WEAVE spectrograph on the William Herschel telescope (La Palma), a team led by @ucl.ac.uk and #CardiffUniversity, with the participation of IAC, has detected a structure never seen before.

👉 www.iac.es/en/outreach/...

Screenshot from threads where a guy says we are going to announce the detection of aliens soon. I replied with scientific information dismissing the claims. He replies “we shall see. Hope I am right! I checked it with google AI”

1 PhD in planetary astro vs. a dude & his AI 🥴

Took a very preliminary look at the first of the new Chinese megaconstellation ITU filings (CTC1). Inclinations from 40 to 100 deg, heights from 300 to 21500 km, plus 4 sats in Molniya orbit.

Race to the pulsar, Héctor Vives A couple years ago we got to visit a pulsar in our Star Wars RPG adventure! So, being the astrophysicist that I am, I just had to draw it. Several crews, including ours, were summoned to a planet in ...

Finally uploaded this piece to ArtStation too. @jointheschwarz.bsky.social took us to a pulsar during a #StarWarsRPG adventure, so I had to draw it 😄

In the link you can also see the original pencil drawing with no edits, and a quick mock-up I did to help me draw the Gymsnor-3 freighter:

Speaker at front of small conference center room with a slide that reads, Ethics of outer space isn't about personal virtue. It is about how and why we make decisions that affect the space environment.

So very here for @profkelsey.bsky.social giving a room of astronomers a 101 on the ethics of outer space. Get to room 226a if you're at #aas247 and learn some things!

Cabecera del calendario del IAC para el año 2026

El Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias y el Museo de la Ciencia y el Cosmos publican su Calendario Astronómico 2026.

📅 Eclipse de Sol (12 de agosto), cometas, lluvias de estrellas y más.

🔗 Ver completo 👉 www.iac.es/es/divulgaci...

#Astronomía #EclipseSolar #CalendarioAstronómico #IAC

3I/ATLAS Flyby apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25122...
This deep exposure captures the comet from another star system as it gently swept across a faint background of stars in the constellation Leo

Space Astronomy Is Under Threat As New Paper "Raises Important Concerns" About Megaconstellations Light pollution from satellites affects more than just the Earth.

Thanks to @drcarpineti.bsky.social at @iflscience.com for featuring CSE in this story about the recent Nature paper by Borlaff, Marcum and Howell.

www.iflscience.com/space-astron...

#Space #SpaceEnvironment #Satellites

I mean, just check out this stunning new image from SPHEREx, the latest NASA space mission. It's mapping the full sky in 102 colors, and choosing the right combinations can reveal different information about the Universe. Here's our galaxy in infrared colors that pick out stars:

'Crash Clock' warns Earth orbit is nearing disaster as megaconstellations push space traffic to brink Satellite ‘Crash Clock’ shows orbit 2.8 days from potential disaster

Earth’s orbit is now so crowded with spacecraft and debris that a catastrophic satellite collision could occur in just 2.8 days if avoidance systems fail, which could disrupt GPS and global communications, according to a new study.

www.accuweather.com/en/space-new...

Andromeda's tenuous veil: A likely Milky Way nebula projected toward M31 A large, faint nebula was unexpectedly discovered near M31 using narrowband [O III] images. Its apparent size and the lack of a clear counterpart at other wavelengths make it unique and challenging to...

Link to the full article here! Free on @ArXiv

arxiv.org/abs/2412.08327

Mystery solved? Baffling huge nebula near Andromeda Galaxy is actually in our neighborhood Weird arcing cloud of oxygen is most likely part of the Milky Way, not our giant neighbor

Remember the mysterious giant oxygen cloud that was found around our neighbour the Andromeda Galaxy?

My friend @alumbrerasc.bsky.social from @cefca-oaj.bsky.social discovered that it is much closer to you than previously thought 👀

badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/mystery-so...

The number of active satellites in orbit has now passed the 14000 mark according to my estimates:

Infographic slide titled Major LEO Communication Constellations that shows more than a dozen pie charts, sized by total satcon size, with the fraction of launched sats indicated. Starlink stands out as one of the largest pies with the biggest fraction deployed, but many other future satins have similar sized circles.

Day 2 of the UN/SKAO Workshop on #DarkAndQuietSkies for Science and Society in Vienna. Yesteray focused on impacts to astronomy and mitigations, and today features more of an industry perspective. Patricia Cooper opened with a keynote describing how the LEO space boom is just getting started.

We're back after lunch in Vienna for more #DarkAndQuietSkies. This next panel, moderated by Patricia Cooper, features speakers from Eutelsat (formerly OneWeb), Amazon Leo (formerly Kuiper), SpaceX Starlink, and AST SpaceMobile. The latter two are online. Should be an interesting afternoon 🔭

ESO Director General Xavier Barcons (left) and Piero Benvenuti (right), IAU CPS Director, shake hands after signing an agreement. Posters of ESO and the International Astronomy Union’s Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky are visible behind them.

We are continuing to expand our efforts to protect the night skies.

ESO signed an agreement with the IAU's Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky to become a contributing partner.
https://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann25010/

🔭 🧪
📷 A. Daniels (SKAO)

Desde que tú no me quieres
yo todos los días me muero.
Y alimento, con mi carne,
en Monfragüe buitres negros,
en Monfragüe buitres negros.  

Robe Iniesta🪽

An absolute horrific nightmare of two AI bots caught in a loop with each other is the perfect example of the total nothingness of AI “brains”.

Greetings from Vienna, where the UN/SKAO Workshop on Dark and Quiet Skies for Science and Society is underway! If you ever need a reminder of why astronomers do what we do, I implore you to listen to IAU President Willy Benz describe how observatories peer into the universe as time machines. 🔭

La NASA advierte: (casi) todas las imágenes de telescopios espaciales estarán contaminadas muy pronto Se espera que, para 2030, haya 530.000 satélites en la órbita baja de la Tierra. Algo que no solo afectará a los observatorios terrestres

National Geographic se hace eco del problema de la contaminación del cielo nocturno por las megaconstelaciones de satélites.

Incluso los telescopios espaciales tendrán que restringir sus observaciones para evitar los satelites de internet.

www.nationalgeographic.com.es/ciencia/nasa...

The beacons are lit

Thank you @npr.org for sharing our work about satellite light contamination. The first step to solve a problem is to study it.

You can access all the data from the article here, including visuals:

zenodo.org/records/1765...

I can remember when it used to be exciting to see a satellite moving across the night sky.

Satellite fleets pose problems for space telescopes, too Proposed “megaconstellations” would contaminate images from telescopes in low-Earth orbit, including Hubble

Ever since the first SpaceX Starlink satellites were launched in 2019, astronomers have warned that satellite constellations will contaminate images of the night sky.

A new study finds that in the next 2 decades, even space-based telescopes could face the same issue. https://scim.ag/3XyjcIw

Surging satellite numbers threaten to dazzle even space telescopes Low-flying satellites can ruin astronomical observations

Low-flying satellites can ruin astronomical observations

Satellites keep photobombing the Hubble telescope, and it’s getting worse Overcrowded orbits are making astronomers’ jobs harder.

Satellites keep photobombing the Hubble telescope, and it’s getting worse