Stunning Image of Our Satellite-Choked Night Skies

To create this composite image, photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together.

This is the most time-consuming photo edit I’ve EVER done!

I left my camera photographing the night sky over Mt Taranaki for nearly TWO HOURS, capturing 578 photographs.

The result? An estimated 14,450 satellite trail appearances, representing approximately 1,400 individual satellites! 😱

I manually masked in EVERY SINGLE TRAIL from the original photographs — approximately 45 HOURS of editing to create this one image!

The Guardian has more on how he created the image (which, despite many online commenters’ beliefs, is not AI):

Larsen, 51, says he set his camera up to take an unlimited number of eight-second-long shots, with a two-second gap in between each photo. “I left her running for two hours and captured 578 photos … That was the easy part.”

The hard part came next. Larsen spent about 45 hours layering the individual photos – each of which contained about 25 satellites – over one another, using Adobe Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.

“I could start to see the pattern emerging and realised: ‘Wow, this looks really awesome.’ I knew if I carried on it would look even better and more impressive in terms of satellite numbers.”

Fellow photographer Vincent Laforet called Larsen’s image “an important photograph”:

I was initially startled. Then confused. Then fascinated all in quick succession.

And then I felt a deep sense of betrayal once I realized that what I was tracking with my eyes were a series of small satellites. And btw: that they likely had ruined my long exposure that I was capturing at the time.

I remember asking in the moment:

Who gave anyone permission do this?

• astronomy
• Brendan Larsen
• photography
• satellites
• Vincent Laforet

Using satellites to find ancient civilizations

Any old archaeologist can find ancient cities by looking for evidence of buildings etc, but it takes a next level Indiana Jones to use satellites. A group of archaeologists are doing just that, finding “14,000 settlement sites spanning eight millennia in 23,000 square kilometres of northeastern Syria”.

The satellite-based method relies on the fact that human activity leaves a distinctive signature on the soil, called anthrosols. Formed from organic waste and decayed mud-brick architecture, anthrosols are imbued with higher levels of organic matter and have a finer texture and lighter appearance than undisturbed soil — resulting in reflective properties that can be seen by satellites.

…

Menze trained software to detect the characteristic wavelengths of known anthrosols in images spanning 50 years of seasonal differences. This automation was key. “You could do this with the naked eye using Google Earth to look for sites, but this method takes the subjectivity out of it by defining spectral characteristics that bounce off of archaeological sites,” says Ur.

(via @phillydesign)

• archaeology
• satellites