Higher resolution images: http://www.universetoday.com/13587/space-debris-illustrated-...

My first thought was wow! My second thought was, wait a minute...

The image certainly shows there are a lot of satellites floating around Earth. But "crowded" is a relative term. There are many, many miles of space between those satellites.

Yep. I did a back of the envelope calculation once, and I think it was something like a thousand cubic miles for every satellite in low Earth orbit.

Alaska would look overwhelmingly crowded too if you drew even a tiny fraction of the population as small visible people on the map.

Still pretty crowded when the benchmark is resolving it with a radio beam. Part of 1 degree for geosynchronous. Tracking satellites in lower orbits also tricky. A few miles separation when they're 90 miles away is cutting it pretty fine, when its a moving target.

This is astonishing, especially after the movie Gravity. I didn't know we have so many satellites up there. One thing that always keeps me alert is the amount of space litter. My friend said Gravity makes him lost interest in space travel and this image has stopped me ever wanting to go up there. Despite the distance between satellite, they eventually will become useless and many are destroyed in the space due to security reason.

Kudos to people who work on space mission, getting the right window and right path precisely is really difficult given the amount of litter and traffic we have right now...

I would be interested in getting a map labels the ownership of each satellite and what each of them does. I suspect there are clusters, based on country and companies. I'd like to see an interactive map like Google Map and Google Earth looking at Earth and satellites.

* if every satellite was 10,000 times bigger than it really is.

This is a link to a yahoo news scrape of a bgr.com story about a tweet about a picture. Seriously?

https://twitter.com/ValaAfshar/status/439577697606701056

Totally nonsense picture, sure there are satellites in the sky, most of them approaching obsolescence, but satellites scaled to become naval carriers?

Satellites are only going to get smaller and smaller, check out Skybox Imaging.

Totally to scale, right. Satellites are the size of countries now.

I am going to say the same thing in a different way:

"The satellites in the image are not to scale, and this makes the image misleading."

Was that so hard?

Didn't realise we have put that many satellites into orbit.

If you had asked me out of the blue how many sats humans had launched I would have guessed a couple of hundred.

If humans are good at anything, it's litter.

Would be interesting to see in an animation.