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Robert Walker

It’s just the same as an image without space junk. If you have a 720p HD image from space, and Earth fills it vertically, each pixel is 17 kilometers across (12,742/720). You wouldn’t even see a 1.8 kilometer diameter Stanford Torus at that scale - it would be about a tenth of a pixel in diameter.

NASA artwork from the 1970s for the Stanford Torus design

For more about these habitats see Asteroid Resources Could Create Space Habs For Trillions; Land Area Of A Thousand Earths

As for seeing anything in the black sky around the Earth - unless it is a superimposed image, then exposing so you can see the Earth without it being washed out means you can’t see the stars. Anyway a satellite or space debris would only look like another star unless it was a movie and you could see it moving. And when we see the ISS fly overhead as a bright star it is only a few hundred kilometers away. To be far enough away to see the Earth in more or less its entirety, you need to be a few thousand kilometers away - if it is a genuine photo. At a distance of, say, 4000 km, the ISS would be a hundredth of the brightness it is seen from the Earth’s surface, or about 5 magnitudes fainter. For a genuine photograph of the entire Earth that doesn’t focus in on a particular spot, you have to be even further away, say, geostationary orbit, and that makes it more like ten magnitudes fainter.

So even if you blocked out the Earth and Sun (easy to do in space) and looked at a dark sky, the satellites and space debris would be just about impossible to see unless you are pretty close to it. From geostationary orbit, even the ISS would be a faint star of magnitude 4 or so at its brightest (−5.9), hard to spot though visible to naked eye.

You would be able to see a Stanford Torus from geostationary orbit as a bright star, in appropriate illumination conditions, however. At about 18 times the length of the ISS, can get a very rough estimate. Of course the shape is different, surface brightness etc, this is just a very rough back of the envelope first guess, makes it about 324 times brighter. So compared to the brightness of the ISS as seen from the surface of Earth, a Stanford Torus at the same distance from you as Earth, seen from GEO might perhaps be about 3 times brighter, so about a magnitude or so brighter, it might be as bright as -7 or even brighter. Brighter than a crescent moon though nowhere near as bright as a full moon. The astronomical magnitude scale. So, even though so tiny they’d only span a tenth of a pixel, if we ever build those, they might be bright enough so we see them as extra dots in HD images of the Earth??

About the Author

Robert Walker

Robert Walker

Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.
Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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