Thanks, Dickface.

Almost a decade ago, I posted about how light pollution in the big city sucks:

That's one thing I miss about down home, how fucking dark it gets without all the artificial lighting like we have here in NYC. The kind of dark where it's possible to have no idea someone is standing five feet in front of you. Seeing taillights across the river slowly move along a bridge a few miles away. Such darkness has always been comforting to me, and I think I get depressed sometimes being in the big city where there's never absolute darkness - that omnipresent pink hue of light drives me fucking bananas. It's like that awful feeling as a kid of going to bed when it's still light outside.

And years later the folks over at Vox noted some steps were being taken in the right direction:

The best known example to date is in Los Angeles, which is replacing its old bulbous streetlamps that scattered light in every direction with newer, more efficient LEDs that only send light downward. As Ucilia Wang recently illustrated in Forbes, the reduction in glare has been dramatic, and the skies overhead are now noticeably darker. (That said, cities interested in reducing light pollution need to be careful about color selection. Many LEDs largely emit blue light, which brightens the night sky more than any other color.)

Aaaaaaaaand now we find out Elon Musk may be fucking it all up again:

In astronomy, the greatest resource of all is a dark, clear night sky: humanity's window to the Universe. Traditionally, its enemies have been turbulent air, cloud cover, and artificial light pollution. But very recently, a new type of pollutant has begun to pose an existential threat to astronomy itself: mega-constellations of satellites. If Elon Musk's Starlink project continues as it has begun, it will likely end ground-based astronomy as we know it.

If these satellites were either faint, few in number, or slowly moving, this would be only a mild problem. If you're only observing a narrow region of the sky, you'd simply reject any exposure frames (or even just the pixels from them) where the offending objects streak across the sky. But with large numbers of bright, rapidly moving satellites, particularly if you're searching for changes from frame-to-frame (like many current and future observatories are designed to do), you have to throw out any exposure frame with these artifacts in them.