12/35mm for wide / nightscape shots, 135mm for regular wide field and 500mm for deep sky-ish stuff.

My sensor is APS-C, so the “effective” focal length is 1.5x the above lens values

The ISS is visible from any single point you’re standing on for up to about a minute when passing directly overhead and then the next orbit isn’t close enough for you to see.

Some comm and weather sats here and there but really nothing crazy. It was even fun to have individual shots with a streak on it cause it was a relatively rare occasion.

Now there’s just no hiding from it. Yes, the process of stacking images averages out the streaks in the final image, but for the average person with a wide lens taking a milky way shot during summer camping it’s basically impossible to not have like 5 streaks on it.

I started doing amateur astrophotography last year with a camera, lens and startracker.

The way it works is you take dozens or hundreds of photos of the same thing, then combine them into one final image, a process called “stacking”.

To gather faint light, each photo is a long exposure gathering light for 30 - 120 seconds.

I have therefore taken over 20.000 long exposure shots of the night sky, pointing at different things, using wider and narrower lenses and NOT ONE SINGLE CLICK came without a Starlink streaking across the frame.

Damn. This must be one of the most terrifying cyber attacks of all time. Like, Mr. Robot level of breach and execution.

In that show they rig the UPS batteries of server buildings to blow up, this is basically the same idea on a smaller scale.

Either that, or they compromised the manufacturer of the pagers and put small explosive devices in there. Truly legendary and insane.