35mm Night Sky — Starlink 1M proposal

35mm ƒ/1.8 ISO 3200

LIVE 49.4°N · Jihlava

0.0s

STARS0

SATELLITES0

≈ 0 across full sky

naked-eye view

SIMULATED · STARLINK ~10K · 35MM FULL-FRAME

Scenario

Now &middot; ~10k<br>Approved &middot; 42k<br>Proposed &middot; 1M

View

Naked eye<br>Long exposure

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The story

SpaceX has asked the U.S. FCC to launch up to one million satellites as orbital AI data centres — on top of the ~10,000 Starlink already in orbit. Astronomers warn that at that scale we&rsquo;d see more satellites than stars across large parts of the night, everywhere on Earth. This viewfinder shows roughly what a 35mm frame of dark sky would look like under each scenario.

BBC News — SpaceX applies to launch a million satellites &rarr;

Model & assumptions

A 35mm full-frame lens sees about 54.4&deg; &times; 37.8&deg; — roughly 9.5% of the visible hemisphere. The naked eye sees fewer than 4,500 stars across the whole sky, so a dark-sky 35mm frame holds ~410 stars . They&rsquo;re drawn as a star-tracked frame (fixed), so any moving point is a satellite.

How they actually look & move. Real Starlinks are bright bluish-white dots that shine steadily — they don&rsquo;t blink like aircraft. Because every satellite rides a shared orbital plane , a pass is a set of parallel tracks , not random scatter. Fresh launches travel as a tight, evenly-spaced &ldquo;string of pearls&rdquo; train before they disperse around their plane. This sim uses a handful of discrete lanes (Starlink shells sit near 53&deg;, 70&deg; and 97.6&deg; polar inclinations) with trains running along them; each train is sized slightly differently to reflect varying orbital altitude.

Counts. Lawler, Boley & Rein calibrated to real Starlink: at 65,000 satellites, 1 in 15 visible points is already a satellite. I scale that visible-fraction per scenario, then raise the 1M case — the proposed orbital-data-centre satellites sit in higher orbits that stay sunlit longer, so their all-sky sim predicts tens of thousands naked-eye-visible at once.

ScenarioConstellationVisible / skyIn 35mm frame<br>Now~10,000~80~8<br>Approved42,000~270~26<br>Proposed1,000,000~15,000~1,400

Illustrative prototype, not an observatory-grade ephemeris — real visibility swings with season, latitude and time of night, peaking near dusk and dawn. The plan was filed with the FCC in Jan 2026. Appearance/motion: space.com, DLR, orbitalradar. Counts: Lawler, Boley & Rein, &ldquo;A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky,&rdquo; The Conversation, Mar 2026.