Happy New Year!

We’re very happy to have Patrick Seitzer (Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Michigan) present to us remotely over Zoom.

Presentation

‘Intruders in the night sky: satellites, more satellites, and even more satellites’

Image Credit : CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/DECam DELVE Survey. (DECam shot of 19 starlinks crossing the field of view of the Dark Energy Camera on the 4.0-m Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo in Chile)

When : Thursday January 26th at 7pm

Where : In Person & Online

In-Person : Beban Park Social Centre Rooms 2/3

Online : Zoom email invite to Society members

Brief : In the next decade over 400,000 new satellites are planned to be launched into low Earth orbit (LEO). Compare this to some 50,000 objects that are currently tracked and maintained in the catalog of Earth orbiting objects. Many, if not all, of these new satellites could be visible to the unaided eye even in light polluted skies. I’ll review why these new satellites are being launched, and what astronomers are trying to do about them.

Bio : Patrick Seitzer is a Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. His speciality is optical observations of space debris: surveys to determine the amount of such debris at geosynchronous orbit (GEO) followed by photometric and spectrographic observations of individual pieces to determine their physical nature. Recently he has worked on the problem of large numbers of bright satellites and how they will affect the appearance of the night sky.