New fleets of private satellites are clogging the night sky
Astronomer Cliff Johnson was peering into deep space before dawn when something close to Earth interrupted his view. He and colleagues were searching for dwarf galaxies snuggled up to the Milky Way using the Victor M. Blanco 4-m Telescope in Chile. The team was remotely operating the scope from a room at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., about 8,200 kilometers away. “We had a nice clear night,” says Johnson, of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Through outdoor webcams at the observatory, the team could spy on the scene in the high Chilean desert. The sky was immaculate: inky black with dots of white starlight. “All of a sudden, through this webcam, we started seeing these streaks popping through,” Johnson says. Dashes of white light shot across the view, like laser fire from a sci-fi battle cruiser. The intruders flew right across the telescope’s gaze: In a five-minute exposure with the scope’s camera, 19 white lines defaced the picture. It didn’t...