I saw a few of these black Anish Kapoor sculptures. The experience was worth the cost. The brain has a hard time processing it.

Which is all a dumb marketing stunt because it was never a pigment artists could paint with anyway.

Semple's humorous long-form performance art, pillorying Kapoor, while developing a menagerie of new pigments, is much more interesting than Kapoor's sculptures.

Anyone could have made at least the same with the given material, and a more talented artist could stun, but sadly they are not allowed to because contract.

"The paint is sold through Semple’s brand, Culture Hustle, and remains explicitly unavailable to Anish Kapoor or his affiliates"

Correct. This is why SpaceX rejected using black coatings alone for Starlink. Mirrored surfaces that they tested instead were darker than VANTA black.[0]

On some surfaces they use a SpaceX-designed coating called Low Reflectivity Black, which is the least specular space-rated paint by a factor of 5.[1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNc5yCYth5E#t=2430s

[1] https://starlink.com/public-files/BrightnessMitigationBestPr...

I think it only needs to be on the Earth side of the satellite?

Needs signup to download a form? :/

communication link bandwidths are typically miniscule compared to optical spectrum of the sun

I don't think this is comparable. One is generally taking long-time exposures for astronomy pictures (hence the streaks).

So if the satellite is simply blocking light, in the worst case, it will block the light of a star, maybe for a few milliseconds(?) dimming the star in the final picture by a minuscule amount.

This might still be problematic (influencing spectroscopy? dimming the star slightly, influencing some measurements there?) but probably still better than potentially mixing in light from a difference source (?)

Yup, they wrote the paper.

> "...researchers demonstrate how Vantablack® 310 – an ultra-black coating developed by University of Surrey spinout Surrey NanoSystems, co-authors of the paper..."

Thats really cool. He did a fine job sewing. I tried something similar with green-screen fabric and followed the same procedure: make a pattern from existing clothing, cut out the material, and sew it up. It's very hard.

there are a lot of stars, the probability of obscuring a sufficient number of suitable stars is astronomically small

The blackbody equilibrium temperature at 1AU from the sun is about 278K. All satellite materials are fine at 278K because that's within the expected range of storage and atmospheric launch temperatures.

The equilibrium temperature of a polished aluminum surface at 1AU from the sun is 416K, hot enough to melt polyethylene and at least weaken many of the relevant aerospace plastics like the PET in mylar film.

Painting polished aluminum black drastically raises emissivity along with the lowered reflectivity, and brings its behavior closer to a blackbody.

So does allowing aluminum to oxidize, which it does almost instantaneously in atmosphere. So it's not like it's going to change anything drastically.

The reason this seems like it should change things a lot is that you're used to convectively cooled matte surfaces on Earth, where emissivity and radiative cooling is a less relevant factor and the only significant effect of painting something black is primarily that it absorbs more energy.

That's the cost of pollution.

Give it few years and they'll get LED colors and we'll see them in "I'm lovin it" formation.

I'm sure they use image stacking to mitigate these issues.

So? Intermittent, short-termed blockages happen (jets and satellites already do this, they just aren't black).

Astronomers don't look first and then aim their cameras, and most interesting features (essentially all of them) require long exposures, which would make this problem a slight, one-time variance in brightness.

> Noelia Noel

She is from Argentina. Both are common given names and family names here. Neither is in the top 10 list, but they are not unusual to cause surprise. I'd recommend to avoid using both together to avoid nasty online comments.

> Astha Astha

She is from India. Astha is a common given name there. It looks like it's common in some areas to have only a given name and no family name. I guess in some form she was had to fill a family name and decided to repeat the given name instead of using NULL.

Link to the classic article by patio11: "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" (2010) https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... (a few HN discussions, in particular https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492464 | 150 points | Nov 2019 | 144 comments)