SpaceX's Starlink Internet service will require a dense constellation of satellites to provide consistent, low-latency connectivity.

Although SpaceX has taken steps to reduce the impact of its hardware, there's no way to completely eliminate the tracks the satellites leave across ground-based observations.

A team of astronomers has used archival images from a survey telescope to look for Starlink tracks over the past two years.

Over that time, the number of images affected rose by a factor of 35, and the researchers estimate that by the time the planned Starlink constellation is complete, pretty much every image from their hardware will have at least one track in it.

To determine how often the presence of these satellites was picked up by the ZTF cameras, the team behind the new analysis took data on the orbits of all Starlink hardware and compared it to the area of the sky captured in every archival ZTF image.

And once there were over 1,500 Starlink satellites in orbit, the ZTF would commonly image over 200 in a 10-day period.

Images that capture the horizon will include angles that show a lot more of the space occupied by Starlink orbits.

These tracks also saw explosive growth as the constellation of satellites filled in.

In late 2020, only about 6 percent of the twilight images were affected.

SpaceX already has approval to increase the number of Starlink satellites to well over 10,000; the authors estimate that at 10,000, every image at twilight will likely contain a Starlink track.

SpaceX has indicated it would eventually like to boost the numbers to over 40,000 satellites, at which point all twilight images are likely to have four tracks.

The ZTF's main mission—to pick out rare events caused by distant, energetic phenomena—is largely unaffected by the growing number of satellite tracks.