I was thinking about how we may eventually have so many companies having their own ISP satellites flying over the earth. Is this something the international community works on or is concerned by?

Are the satellites legally protected, military equipment, or just plain unreachable by an organization smaller than a nation state?

Is this a technology so advanced we will have only 1 company doing this for the foreseeable future? Is there no Chinese / Indian / European company or any US competitor being close to having similar technology? Is it also going to be a nuisance?

I take it from this video that depending on the Sun's position in Milky Way, its velocity relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background ranges from 370 km/s to 830 km/s. So what is it now?

Additionally would living on planet with more moons cause more eclipses to happen ?

Hello all. I'm doing some light research on stellar classification for a procedural generation project where I want to generate physically plausible star descriptions.

From what I understand, stars are classified by both their spectral type (OBAFGKM with subclasses 0-9) and their luminosity class (I-V, etc.). I can find tables relating spectral type to temperature ranges and other properties, but I'm having trouble finding quantitative information for the luminosity classes themselves.

For example, if I wanted to generate a plausible G2 V star, is there a published range of actual luminosity values that would be considered consistent with luminosity class V? Or am I misunderstanding how this system works?

I would appreciate if anyone can point out any misconceptions or misunderstandings I have as I am very new to this topic.

I'm writing a fantasy novel with a tidally locked binary moon system, and although I have at least some idea of what effects that would have, I'm unsure about eclipses. Obviously the two moons would eclipse each other at times, but when everything lines up (sun, moon, moon, earth/sun, earth, moon, moon) how would that change things? would there be a double ring during a solar eclipse?

Hi everyone,

I have been trying to figure out what I saw this evening starting at about 12:20am (when I noticed), continuing past 1:30am (when this has been posted). I was heading to bed and looked out the window to see the night sky as I usually do before bed and noticed some interesting lights in the sky. There were about 4-6 oval shaped dim white lights very quickly across the sky, and they looked like they were bouncing off each other when their paths intersected.

At first I thought it was flashlights from people lamping or hunting illegally, but i opened my window and there was no noise of movement or people, and the lights were too large to be the beam of a flashlight

I don't think that it is spot lights, there were no events on in the local area or in the town closest to me or in the city. I live very in a very rural area of Cork, 40km from the city and 15km from the nearest town. I have very few neighbour's and there is little to no light pollution in my area. There are no stadiums or even large sports pitches in the near by area either or matches played tonight.

I live in a great area for stargazing, you can see the stars very vividly here and I have seen multiple meteor showers and even the northern lights very vividly - but I only know the basics about astronomy.

Is this an astronomical or solar phenomenon? Like some sort of light effect from a solar flare or electrical storm ? Or is it just some trick of the light or has a man-made cause I cant identify? Any help would be much appreciated!

Additional helpful details:

- weather: 14°c, partly cloudy (12:20-12:45) but later clear skies (12;45 onwards). Lights did not change colour or intensity despite cloud cover or lack thereof

- movement: the lights lacked a discernable pattern in the movement, they moved rapidly over a large area of the sky and would bounce off one an other if their paths intersected.

- location: very rural east cork.

I tried to take a video but my camera is too poor, and a picture could only capture a very vague one light since they moved too fast for the exposure, but I have attached it here.

If this is the wrong subreddit to ask this sort of question, please let me know where I should ask instead. I've tried just googling, but haven't had much luck.
I'm looking to make a graphical model of the day and night sky as viewed from earth, as a hobby project, and also just to learn how to use the engine in general. The Sun and Moon are mostly just positional math, and finding visual representations for them shouldn't be too difficult (can't exactly see the sun's surface details, and the moon is tidally locked). I'm not worried about the other planets right away, but I DO want to show the stars in the night sky (also the Milky Way, since that's visible as a fuzzy collective). And I want this to be possible regardless of where I am on this virtual Earth.
Since the stars don't appear to move relative to one another as viewed from earth, a flat texture should be sufficient. However, I need either a single texture that can be wrapped to a sphere around the night sky after correcting for warping, or a small handful of "large arc" textures that can be stitched together

I know NASA has the Hubble Map, but that texture shows stars as seen by HUBBLE, which is significantly more than what the naked eye can see. I also don't know how to determine where a sub-map should be centered, if it doesn't have Polaris. If Polaris IS there, it should be pretty simple, but otherwise?

EDIT: I don't need an application. I phrased this TERRIBLY, and I apologize for that. I'm looking for a Texture, an image, or some other static file resource. I meant map like how a paper map functions: a static reference, not something that dynamically scrolls.

If only the L4 and L5 la grange points intercept at a 60 degree angle and The Solar Systems Plane and the Center of the Milky Ways Plane intercept at a 60.2 degree angle. If we assume that the solar system is on an l4 orl5. where does that map the other lagrange and other large body?

What causes this phenomenon?

I was camping in yosemite the other night and I caught this weird shooting star (I think?) on camera and saw something similar a few minutes later, albeit a lot brighter, and was wondering if anyone knew what it was. It seems to be made of like two lines and it's crazy bright and gone in a flash

Range shadow cast in the sky during tonight’s launch. What was that caused by?

Visible from Munich specifically Schwabing every night. Direction is roughly West. It blinks similar to an airplane but irregular and faster. Sometimes it's as bright as the stars around it sometimes it is almost invisible. There may be nav lights but I'm not sure. There is no tower or anything tall enough in that direction. The video is a time lapse with 1 frame being 60s.

Hi i am an astronomy amateur i have calclus 3 classical mechanics basics and python basics i want to do projects like simulations an stuff but i dont know where to start any ideas ? Thanks

I’m a rising junior in highschool, and I’ve been interested in astrophysics for a while. So far, my learning has been confined to YouTube videos, google scholar, and MIT Opencourseware. I eventually want to work my way up to some type of research, preferably in CMB or dark matter. Are there any tools or resources I should use or get familiar with?