I understand why we can’t see stars during the day: the sun illuminates the atmosphere and effectively blots them out. But why can’t we see low earth orbit satellites, which are not exactly “outside” the atmosphere? If they’re inside, shouldn’t we see them reflecting sunlight back to us?

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    318 days ago

    I recall seeing one of these hyper-zoom videos on yt where they zoomed into the blue sky and at one point it turned black and stars appeared. I imagine the same holds true for LEO sats… you just need to get past that isoluminescnce barrier?

    • threelonmusketeers
      link
      fedilink
      English
      518 days ago

      videos on yt where they zoomed into the blue sky and at one point it turned black and stars appeared

      This doesn’t sound realistic to me. Could you share a link to the video?

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          217 days ago

          I think you fell victim to some video editing tricks. I am quite sure that you can’t zoom past the blue part or something like that.

          Unless, of course, zooming in would mean actually moving upwards through the atmosphere.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            117 days ago

            That is certainly a possibility. As I recall, the video was not focused on “zoom to the stars” but something else (I’m thinking it was “you can actually see the moon moving through the sky”), so I’m more inclined to believe that I am either mis-remembering the “stars” part of the video, or that what I saw in the video was not stars (maybe Venus, Jupiter, or satellites) as it was certainly not a vast high-contrast star-field…