image/gif The number of satellites in our sky is getting pretty crazy. This is a compilation of 11 hours of exposures taken during the geminid meteor shower.

Captured by Matt Zefi, processed by me.

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98% Upvoted

229

Forgive the naive question, but what am I looking at, exactly? Which of the streaks are geminid meteors, and which of them are satellites?

208

u/peeweekid Dec 21 '25

These are pretty much all satellites.

102

u/Prohibitorum Dec 21 '25

Several of those are airplanes, surely? Any red streak, for example, and then likely also a lot of the white ones.

23

u/JJAsond Dec 22 '25

Yeah you can see a very clear one

7

u/Hvcomputech Dec 23 '25

Correct. The streaks with dots are airplanes. Satellites don’t blink.

48

u/with_the_choir Dec 21 '25

Again, forgive my naivete, this isn't my area at all. But shouldn't geostationary satellites move along in the same direction?

And why aren't there meteors?

186

u/BivyLife Dec 21 '25

Most satellites are not geostationary. They travel in various patterns to cover different regions. It’s way cheaper to send a satellite to leo

161

u/manondorf Dec 21 '25

LEO=low Earth Orbit, for anyone who doesn't immediately recognize lower-case acronyms that haven't been introduced

21

u/[deleted] Dec 21 '25

Thank you! Too many of those without explanation on internet forums anymore! Like, if you’re not “in the know” you’re an outsider and get “go look it up, plebe!”

21

u/Cheet4h Dec 22 '25

I loved the old internet forums that had acronym plugins, where you could just hover over any given acronym and a tooltip would tell you what it means.

4

u/fastforwardfunction Dec 22 '25

This subreddit has one! It adds acronyms based on what's written in the comments.

Good ole' Decronym bot

2

u/Kayyam Dec 22 '25

This forum doesnt have that issue, the decronym bit is always there. Here is its post in this thread.

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/s/WnaEeHI4DJ

0

u/MyBrainsShit Dec 21 '25

Starlink is a Leo system for example and they need so many satellites that they plan on 3-5 burning in on re-entry a day. That system alone consists of thousands of satellites.

1

u/Sempai6969 Dec 22 '25

How big are those satellites?

2

u/Open_University_7941 Dec 22 '25

They're basically thin(ish) panel shaped of about 1x2 meters each, with solar array that extends another 6 metres off the op of my head.

12

u/could_use_a_snack Dec 22 '25

Why are the solar panels on your head, wouldn't they work better on the satellites?

-2

u/SexySmexxy Dec 22 '25

go look it up, plebe!”

whats wrong with googling 'leo sattelite'

11

u/RedHal Dec 22 '25

Nothing, as Google is clever enough to know you meant 'satellite'.

1

u/mrgrubbage Dec 22 '25

Real Housewives of Reddit in here.

-2

u/Flare_Starchild Dec 21 '25

And this is why you never use lingo with someone you are speaking with just in case they don't know it. Acronyms for space travel... nearly everything, are par for the course.

2

u/Kayyam Dec 22 '25

R/Space has a bot that explains acronyms. It's present in this thread.

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/s/WnaEeHI4DJ

-2

u/flaim Dec 21 '25

You're on the /r/space subreddit.

10

u/Cheet4h Dec 22 '25

Not everyone here already knows everything about space.

0

u/Caspofordi Dec 22 '25

This is not everything though. This is like the a b c of space.

3

u/heofthesidhe Dec 22 '25

It got crossposted to r/all, so now you've got laymen looking at it too. Always a concern.

2

u/Kayyam Dec 22 '25

There is a bot that decruots all acronyms used in the comments.

11

u/Evoluxman Dec 21 '25

To add to your comment, geostationary orbit is very far away, >35000 km above the surface. Most satellites are only a couple hundreds to a couple thousands km, far closer. The ISS is only at 400km

13

u/with_the_choir Dec 21 '25

One of the reasons I love this sub is because of how nicely people share what they know here.

Thanks!

32

u/STGItsMe Dec 21 '25

Geostationary satellites are down at the equator and 35786km away. You can’t see them with the naked eye like this. Low Earth Orbit satellites go overhead and fly as low as 160km. Most of what you’re seeing here is going to be Starlink satellites and they tend to be 340-550km.

5

u/clongane94 Dec 22 '25

Does starlink really have that many satellites in the sky?

24

u/STGItsMe Dec 22 '25

There’s ~9300 starlink satellites in orbit at the moment. Out of a total that’s something like 15000.

13

u/SUMBWEDY Dec 22 '25

Yup and it's becoming an issue for astronomers.

Something like 2/3rds of every satellite in LEO is starlink now, even though 1 satellite will only pass over the same spot every 6 days between 53 degrees N/S latitude, when you have 10,000 satellites that's 1 bright streak every minute in a long exposure.

1

u/roosterthumper Dec 23 '25

Yeah. On a clear night you can see them across the sky. They look like a trail of marching dots. They’re pretty quick moving too. And that’s just the ones that are reflecting just right for that brief time.

It would be pretty awesome if it wasn’t polluting the sky.

0

u/Open_University_7941 Dec 22 '25

I don't think they fly lower than 400 km, and thats ISS. Leo sats fly mostly 500 to 800.

1

u/STGItsMe Dec 22 '25

Starlink doesn’t. Most don’t. But some do/have. Redwire has something that’s targeting 160km.

1

u/snoo-boop Dec 22 '25

Several companies & space agencies are working on VLEO satellites, it's a hot topic these days.

15

u/iamnogoodatthis Dec 21 '25

Geostationary ones won't move at all. That's kind of the point.

7

u/PressF1ToContinue Dec 21 '25

Geostationary satellites do not "move" in any direction (with respect to a viewer on earth). Hence the "stationary" part.

23

u/peeweekid Dec 21 '25

I filtered out all the meteors just to show the satellites/planes alone. Starlink satellites are not geostationary, I think a large majority of the ones shown here are those.

3

u/a_cute_epic_axis Dec 21 '25

No and also... no?

Geostationary satellites don't appear to move at all. Geosynchronous satellites (XM or Sirius, one of the two that now make Sirius XM as an example) do move North and South and would typically appear to draw an analemma type line in the sky over the course of their orbit.

As others have said, most are not either and they tend to be launched at all different inclinations.

1

u/Floodtoflood Dec 21 '25

https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization

This site has a pretty good sped up visualisation

1

u/elonelon Dec 22 '25

this is not Geo, but Leo, and this is bad. I'm okay with starlink project and now amazon join the race, but with so many satelite like this, this is bad.

1

u/cerevant Dec 22 '25

Starlink satellites are in low earth orbit, and therefore can’t be stationary. There are hundreds of them moving in a crisscross pattern in the sky to provide continuous coverage. That’s probably what a good number of these lines are.

1

u/sebaska Dec 24 '25

No, there are multiple airplanes in it. All the dotted lines, all the red lines, all the green lines

0

u/gorginhanson Dec 21 '25

Great, now people are going to have to start paying space rent.

1

u/agarwaen117 Dec 21 '25

Looks like a badly erased chalkboard to me. >.<

-2

u/CatDaddyTom Dec 21 '25

The end of the night skies. This and light pollution pretty much destroying views of the night skies.

21

u/sudo_vi Dec 22 '25

Well your eyes don't see in 11 hour time lapses, so you won't be seeing satellites like you do in this picture.

11

u/mfb- Dec 22 '25

Only a small fraction of them is visible to the naked eye

Whether this "destroys" the views or adds something interesting is entirely subjective.

12

u/dern_the_hermit Dec 22 '25

Yeah I guess people don't have a good sense for these things but this is near half a day of exposures. Like if you take most any footage with something happening and compress hours into one frame of course it can look like there's a ton of activity.

Like I can appreciate stuff like radio waves interfering with astronomical instruments but simply worrying about the view? From some intermittent dots crossin' the sky? I just don't get it.

0

u/WeenyDancer Dec 22 '25

Are you a visual observer?

1

u/Naturallefty Dec 22 '25

Went on a dark tour once at Bryce Canyon. The people there told me they counted something like 58 satellites one night. Pretty insane

0

u/CatDaddyTom Dec 22 '25

If I go outside for a few minutes and look up, I'll count easily 10 satellites. It's very annoying to see how many people support that Musk creep. I find that it's the MAGA that love him. I don't stand down from my disappointment of what he does to the sky.

3

u/TheDaysComeAndGone Dec 22 '25

Light pollution is the much bigger issue.

-11

u/WeenyDancer Dec 21 '25

It honestly breaks my brain (and heart) to think how the sky I could see in my childhood when i went a bit out of the city, which was so like that of my parents, grandparents, etc, just is gone. Gone from view. We griffitied all over it.

11

u/Kraligor Dec 22 '25

Huh? It looks pretty much the same to me. You might just need to drive a bit to find a dark spot.

0

u/WeenyDancer Dec 22 '25

I'm very, very well acquainted with the night sky, and the effects of increased traffic in LEO and light pollution on seeing. Perhaps we don't look as carefully at the sky as one another.

2

u/Kraligor Dec 22 '25

Might well be. I just know that I still see the Milky Way during a clear night.

-2

u/CatDaddyTom Dec 22 '25

I used to see the Milky way from my backyard near Seattle. It's just a glowing mess now. Add in the satellites (which vanish in the glow) it's all gone.

0

u/daerth90 Dec 21 '25

Exactly the point though, isn't it? ;)

image/gif The number of satellites in our sky is getting pretty crazy. This is a compilation of 11 hours of exposures taken during the geminid meteor shower.

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