A new communications satellite has instantly become one of the brightest objects in the night sky and astronomers are peeved, though when are they not?

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BlueWalker 3 is a test run for AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird satellite constellation, designed for direct orbit-to-ground smartphone service. To achieve this the satellites are much larger than Starlink's - 64 times larger as seen from Earth, and thus 64 times brighter.

>To find the specific impact of BlueWalker 3, the authors of the new study compiled observations of the satellite recorded by amateur and professional astronomers in Chile, the United States, Mexico, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Morocco. This global campaign revealed that BlueWalker 3 reached a magnitude that made it as bright as Procyon and Achernar, two of the 10 most luminous stars in the sky, according to the study.

The problem is not so much that it is bright, as that it moves relative to the stars and spoils your photos, like an inquisitive squirrel at a wedding.

>"I really like how they used many different telescopes from many different places in the world; it highlights how this is truly a global problem," said Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan who was not involved with the study but wrote an article in Nature that accompanied it. "One country, or one small company, launches a satellite and it can be seen everywhere in the world."

That is how satellites work, yes.

>"We shouldn't have progress at any cost," Dr. Tregloan-Reed said. "It's like building a brand-new development over a historical site. You can't just do that. You have to protect these things."

More like building a brand-new development in an uninhabited wasteland. There is literally nothing there.

>He also acknowledged that astronomers don't own the night sky but have a vested interest in preserving it. "What we'd like to do is share the night sky, just not with you" he said.