An Increasingly Crowded Sky

Abstract

For years, on summer evenings, my husband and our daughter’s favourite game was to lie down on the terrace of our house (reasonably sheltered from the village lights in a quiet town in the Ligurian hinterland) and hunt for satellites. When night falls and it’s already dark on Earth, the satellites, orbiting at a height of a few hundred kilometres, are still illuminated by the Sun, and the light they reflect makes them (more or less) easy to spot.