Another man made "star".

[sheeprug]

Here we go again!

"In collaboration with Nevada Museum of Art, artist Trevor Paglen will launch the first satellite to exist purely as an artistic gesture".

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nevadaart/trevor-paglen-orbital-reflector

Personally I can think of some other gestures I'd like to make.  Self obsessed idiots.

SR

[Dave In Vermont]

So - another bright-light to distract & blind us at our observations...

Guess I'll go look for this things' telemetry-data,

Dave

[Dinglem]

I can't believe he said "it will give people a reason to look up at the sky" has he not noticed the other billions of reasons to look!!!

What a complete waste of time and money.

[Guest]

On 30/09/2017 at 10:14, Dave In Vermont said:

So - another bright-light to distract & blind us at our observations...

Guess I'll go look for this things' telemetry-data,

Dave

Interesting Dave. How do you get it's telemetry data? I knew someone back in the 90's who could get the earth images from satellites.

[Marci]

It’ll be on the orbitalreflector.com website when / if it gets launched. Good luck to him as far as I’m concerned. Better than shoving stuff into space for military purposes... and if the project garners press / social media attention, then yes, some people probably will look up who previously didn’t / hadn’t over the 2 months it’ll be up there.  

[steppenwolf]

8 hours ago, Dinglem said:

"it will give people a reason to look up at the sky"

I picked up on that too - is 'plank' too strong a word? As a species we are soooooo shallow

[Dave In Vermont]

5 hours ago, Grumpy Martian said:

Interesting Dave. How do you get it's telemetry data? I new someone back in the 90's who could get the earth images from satellites.

Space-Track.com, which was run by the USAF. But I think it's much easier to go through Celestrak these days:

https://celestrak.com/

For online applications there's HeavenAbove:

http://heavens-above.com/

Or a stand-alone you can download for use anytime, such as PreviSat:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/previsat/

PreviSat is my favorite and uses telemetry from celestrak - great if you want to know when that new, blazing piece of space-junk is due to come ruin your time-exposure photographs.

Best Wishes,

Dave

[Debo]

33 minutes ago, Dave In Vermont said:

great if you want to know when that new, blazing piece of space-junk is due to come

Space-junk just about sums it up perfectly in my opinion.

[timwetherell]

This is the problem of relatively inexpensive cube sats. The odd one doesn't matter so much but you can see how this will end. Every rich daddy will want a "happy birthday princess" light in the sky and it will be ablaze with light polluting junk. Not to mention the hazard all this orbiting shrapnel creates for legitimate space flight. 

[TSRobot]

Sounds a bit nutty to me. Still, I guess no harm will be done. Just hope it doesn't catch on 

[L8-Nite]

Have a feeling the Nevada Museum of Art is going to lose a lot of support due to this.

[Dinglem]

On 02/10/2017 at 09:58, timwetherell said:

This is the problem of relatively inexpensive cube sats. The odd one doesn't matter so much but you can see how this will end. Every rich daddy will want a "happy birthday princess" light in the sky and it will be ablaze with light polluting junk. Not to mention the hazard all this orbiting shrapnel creates for legitimate space flight. 

@timwetherell I'd not thought of using them for that, I have two beautiful grand-daughters now you've got me thinking .............. O damn I'm not rich

[StuartJPP]

Now if the cubesat had a camera and lens on it...pointing out to space...that would be cool....a mini Hubble.