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Secular Brightness Trends of Starlink and OneWeb Satellites

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2026-04-16 v1
Authors: Anthony Mallama
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Abstract

Magnitudes recorded from 2021 through 2026 for Starlink VisorSats reveal brightening of 0.6 magnitudes, while those of OneWeb show dimming of 0.4. Both trends are significant at 3 sigma. This study is based on 1.6 million magnitudes recorded by the MMT9 robotic observatory.

Keywords

Starlink OneWeb brightness trend satellite astronomy MMT observatory

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.13145,
  title  = {Secular Brightness Trends of Starlink and OneWeb Satellites},
  author = {Anthony Mallama},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.13145},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Reviewed by the IAU Center for the Projection of the Dark and Quiet Sky

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