The survey was distributed through our professional networks and social media. We received 21 responses. First we asked about geographic location. As expected, the respondents were overwhelmingly from North America (43%) and Europe (37%). The vast majority of respondents (81%) described their work as "amateur/hobbyist", which we take to mean they identified their work to be recreational in nature rather than professional/other work. Other roles mentioned included (semi-) professional photographer (33%) and “citizen scientist” (24%); we note that respondents could choose more than one option. About an equal number of participants said they took wide-field/landscape astrophotographs (76%) as compared to those who used long-focus lenses or telescopes to take deep-sky (71%) or planetary astrophotographs (57%). Far fewer engaged in speciality astrophotography, such as imaging asteroids (5%).
The overwhelming majority of survey participants (90%) rated the impacts of moving objects on their work as "moderate", "significant" or "severe". Less than 10% said the impacts were "zero" or "minimal". As expected, astrophotographers identified wide-field images of various targets as being most prone to the consequences of moving objects; over half cited subjects such as star trails, constellations and panoramas as examples. Of these, nightscapes featuring the Milky Way were mentioned most often, by three-quarters of participants.
It is not at all surprising — although perhaps the result of selection bias and a small sample size — that 100% of survey respondents described the impacts of satellites and other moving objects on their astrophotography as "more" than they were five years ago. It is reasonable to conclude that this is mainly the result of the launch of ~ 1800 SpaceX Starlink objects in the interim, which constitute nearly all of the larger, and brighter, objects launched into near-Earth space in the same period.
We asked those who said they felt the impact was more in recent years (i.e., 100% of respondents) to estimate the increase as a percentage over the baseline conditions of five years ago. We were surprised at the diversity of responses to this question, which was deliberately phrased as a free response rather than pre-established ranges of numbers. A small majority (61%) of respondents estimated the impact as +50% in the past five years, which turns out to be in rough proportion to the increase in the number of bright objects in near-Earth space in the same time period. With fewer responses each, other suggestions ranged from +5% to +200%.
Next we asked respondents to rate the significance of the impacts of satellites and moving objects in terms of the burden their presence in images imposed on astrophotographers needing to remove them from their images in post-processing. About 95% of respondents indicated that some burden or disadvantage is imposed on their work by satellites and other moving objects in the night sky. Of these, a clear majority (76%) labeled the burden "moderate" to "significant". Curiously, none rated the burden as "severe", a label we defined as a condition in which moving objects essentially made their astrophotography work impossible.
We also asked astrophotographers to speculate on the future. We did not presume that survey respondents had any detailed knowledge of satellites, and we gave them very little information so as to attempt to not bias the results. In order to ask them about the potential for changes in impacts in the future, we provided them with relative numbers of existing functional satellites before the first Starlink launch and a total for the number of Starlink objects launched to date. A significant majority (86%) of
