When , a teacher in New Plymouth, New Zealand, got into astrophotography six years ago, satellites occasionally appeared in his photos. But now, “almost every night-sky photograph I take contains multiple satellite trails”, he says.

To raise awareness of how clogged our skies are becoming, Larsen pointed his camera at Mount Taranaki in New Zealand for almost 2 hours. Afterwards, he spent 45 hours combining the 578 8-second exposures that his camera took during that time to make one image. “I wanted to create an image that would show people, in a single photograph, just how dramatically our night sky is changing,” he says.

The main picture, above, is the composite of all 578 exposures and contains an estimated 14,000 satellite trails. The picture below is a single 8-second exposure, with a few satellite trails.

That doesn’t mean 14,000 satellites flew past in 2 hours, because individual satellites appeared in multiple exposures. But the image does illustrate the large volume of satellites now orbiting us. For example, over 9000 satellites have been deployed by SpaceX since 2019 to deliver its Starlink internet service.

Larsen is concerned about the potential environmental impacts of satellites, from disruption of nocturnal animals like bats and moths to impacts on Earth’s atmosphere as the satellites burn up during re-entry at the end of their lifespans. “I recognise that satellites provide valuable services… but I think we need to take the potential long-term environmental consequences of these enormous satellite constellations seriously,” he says.

SpaceX’s Starlink dodged 300,000 satellite collisions in 2025

The company’s mega-constellation is having to perform a huge number of manoeuvres to prevent a collision in Earth orbit

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Observe this listing

Feedback has, belatedly in life, stumbled upon a new life interest: wildly aspirational property choices. We previously highlighted the Farnborough Centrifuge, a piece of aviation and space-flight history now up for sale as a home for someone with £750,000 to burn. The Centrifuge was still available the last time we checked. Now, chief subeditor Kelsey Hayes has identified an even more expensive domicile up for sale, which has been by the news site London Centric. Compared with this, she notes, the Farnborough Centrifuge “now seems like a bargain”.

When Feedback opened the tab , it announced at the top: “Four bedroom detached house for sale”. While this is technically true, it does not quite capture the scale of the property in question.

What is up for sale is the King’s Observatory in Old Deer Park, London. It is a former astronomical observatory, since converted into a private home. It was built on the orders of King George III (as in The Madness of) in the 1760s, so that he and his wife Queen Charlotte (as in Bridgerton) could observe the 1769 transit of Venus. At the time, this was a major scientific endeavour, because it offered a way to determine the distance from Earth to the sun. Evidently the royals wanted to share the excitement.

Careful examination of the listing reveals that the observatory is still operational: one of the photos shows an antique wood and brass telescope housed inside a cupola. Kelsey notes with bemusement that the estate agents do not seem to regard this as a major selling point: “it’s the last photo in the slideshow”.

In the decades after the transit, the observatory was used for an , including measuring atmospheric electricity and verifying the accuracy of instruments such as clocks. In the 1980s, it became offices, and in the 21st century, a private home. The listing describes it as having not a garden, but “grounds”, and a drive that can accommodate the adjective “sweeping”. Grecian carp are mentioned.

At this point, Feedback had heard enough. We were poised to book a viewing when we noticed the asking price: £18 million. We find ourselves a tad short. We could try for a mortgage, but we fear that by definition it would be sub-prime.

London Centric did highlight one potential disadvantage of purchasing the King’s Observatory: “You do, however, have to live in the middle of a golf course.” Readers and their spouses will have their own views as to whether this is a plus or a minus.

Dust to dust

We continue our efforts to compile the most niche science-themed tourist attractions from around the world. In this we have been aided by Brian Reffin Smith, who alerts us to “an exceptional wonder”: the Museum of Dust.

The museum is the creation of artist and author . It’s a , blue on the outside and red inside. It’s divided into eight compartments: two across, four down. Each houses an array of little bottles of dust.

But not just any dust. Sally has gathered samples from around the world. There is dust from the Great Wall of China and from the wrapping of an ancient Egyptian mummy. Another sample comes from yet another museum, the self-explanatory House of Automata. Do not look at photos of the items on display at the House of Automata unless you want to be inspired to write a M3GAN-style horror movie.

Sometimes people send Sally dust, which must surely cause a brief frisson of alarm when she opens the envelope. She has , sent to her in 2013 by a friend who worked on the show. She also has a sample of dust from the 2007 Celebrity Big Brother house, but has not yet revealed how she obtained it.

Readers eager to see the Museum of Dust need to know it has no permanent home: instead you have to attend one of Sally’s . Just try not to sneeze.

Not in a name

Occasionally Feedback likes to throw a spanner in the works. In that spirit, we will highlight some examples of what we might call anti-nominative determinism: that is, people whose names are the opposite of what we might expect given their jobs.

In Queropalca, a remote district of Peru, a was won by a candidate named Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores. That name contains two waving red flags, but, in fact, Hitler Mussolini is a member of the Ahora NaciÓn party, which is on the centre-left.

This sort of thing seems to happen quite a lot in South America. For instance, between 2017 and 2021, the president of Ecuador was one . Elected as a social democrat, he pivoted to – none of which, one feels, the original Lenin would have approved of.

Likewise, reader Hillary Shaw wrote in to highlight another example of inappropriate naming: the 19th-century poet William Jeffrey Prowse. This one took Feedback a moment to understand because we associate the surname Prowse with the actor who embodied Darth Vader, whereas Hillary simply wanted us to read it without the “w”.

Meanwhile, in Australia, Bonita Ely was alarmed to discover that her next cancer check-up was with a “Dr Kilian”.

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These beautiful photos capture how a remote island community safely shepherds its rare seabirds to the ocean.

The Azores hosts three-quarters of the global population of Cory’s shearwaters, which nest in burrows and clifftops around the Atlantic archipelago. Chicks stay in their nests all spring and summer until they have grown big enough to attempt their first flight, seen in the image above.

Once ready, the young birds take flight by night to avoid predators, using the moon and stars to navigate to the ocean. But it isn’t just predators these birds should be wary of, photographer Andrea Zanenga discovered when he visited Corvo. The tiny Portuguese island has just 430 human inhabitants, but is home to the world’s largest colony of Cory’s shearwaters.

During their fledging window in late October and early November, the young shearwaters are easily confused by artificial lights. The seabirds can’t take off from ground level, so if they crash, they remain stuck on the ground, vulnerable to attack or starvation.

“These are young birds, 3 months old, and most of them are doing their first flight,” says Tânia Pipa, a marine biologist at the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds.

“They get lost. If you have a point with light pollution, they see it as guidance and go to that place, and get disorientated.” On the worst nights, Corvo residents might find dozens of stranded birds on the streets of the island’s only settlement, Vila do Corvo.

An Azores-wide campaign known as SOS Cagarro was launched in 1995 to rescue fallen shearwaters. Volunteers join night walks to spot stranded birds and place them in artificial nests (above).

The birds are released the following day from nearby clifftops.

But the residents of Corvo have gone one better. For five nights during the peak fledging season, all public lighting in Vila do Corvo is switched off from 9pm until midnight to help the birds navigate safely out to the ocean.

Corvo is the only island in the Azores to operate such a self-imposed blackout, leaving it free of light pollution. “When you see this sky with a lot of stars, you feel a little bit smaller,” says Zanenga.

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Pussycats on parade

Some topics appear to be catnip to Feedback’s readers, and one of them is cats. In our 23 September edition, we described a study in which pet cats were fitted with accelerometers. This revealed that they spent the lion’s share of their time doing absolutely nothing, with 20.1 to 41.4 per cent of their time spent sitting down and a further 34.8 to 52.9 per cent devoted instead to lying down.

We suggested that these cats were a tad slothful, and might even be edging towards idleness.

We received some feedback on this opinion. Reader Jack Haley sent us a lengthy text “courtesy of Google AI” (put a pin in that; we’re coming back to it), recounting the experiences of , a geologist in Australia who took part in a in the 2010s.

The results, as outlined in Haley’s text, were startling: “Squid, a heavier ginger tabby, was mapped taking regular nighttime strolls to the local high school and a nearby shopping center. Semi, a black- and-white cat, went much further, venturing a staggering three kilometers away from home.”

Furthermore, “Studies like the Cat Tracker project have shown that roughly 40 per cent of cats whose owners believe they are indoors or close by at night actually range over a hectare or more, frequently engaging in secret, long-distance neighbourhood explorations.”

Curious, Feedback put our exploring paws on and eventually found that the was launched from the University of North Carolina before being in Australia (and there’s now a Cat Tracker 2.0). Its final results were in 2020 in Animal Conservation. “We worked with citizen scientists to track 925 pet cats from six countries, finding remarkably small home ranges,” the feline watchers wrote. The average range was “3.6 hectares” (0.036 square kilometres) and in the sample only three cats ranged over more than 1 square kilometre.

Readers may notice some subtle differences between how the AI framed the results and how the scientists did. Technically, if you think about it, the AI did get the core facts right, and yet, Feedback still thinks cats are quite lazy.

Meanwhile, assistant news editor Sam Wong sent us a study titled “Wealth, health, cats and Toxoplasma gondii: An ecological correlational study of subjective well-being across 93 countries”. This found that “national happiness was positively associated with cat density”.

They mean “population density”, of course, but Feedback is also pretty sure that cats with greater physical density have significant effects on the happiness of their human attendants. One of ours can contract until she has a density approximating that of a neutron star when she wants to sleep on one of her humans.

Raging hellfire

A lot of lectures suffer from a dire lack of relatability. What, a prospective audience might wonder, does the evolutionary divergence of Cambrian lophotrochozoans or a drag-induced skin effect in a Bose-Fermi mixture have to do with my life?

No such relatability limitations affected a on 8 October at Utah State University by Miranda Judson, a graduate student in philosophy at Arizona State University. The organisers noted that a announcing it had unexpectedly gone viral – and it’s no wonder.

The talk was titled “Welcome to Hell: A theodicy”. The subtitle went on to clarify that “This talk argues that the evidence of our world is such that the probability we’re in hell is surprisingly high. If we’re in hell, we’d expect to see the evidence we actually do see”.

Alas, the talk wasn’t streamed online, and Judson doesn’t appear to have yet published a paper on it. But honestly, given the general state of things, we feel it wouldn’t be too difficult to fill in the blanks. We’ll report back if we learn more, hopefully not via the medium of a demonic voice in our head.

Bedtime tales

Speaking of evidence that we’re in hell, readers may have heard of the AI engineer telling his wife that he doesn’t need to read to his kids at bedtime because he can just train an AI to do it for him. If you haven’t heard of this, well, now you have.

The engineer in question is Alvin Sng, who works for a company called Factory. Sng the following on X on 7 October: “My wife: Can you read our baby a book? Me: I can just play an audiobook from my phone. My wife: But then it won’t be in your voice. Me: I can train a voice model.” His conclusion was: “Parenting hits different when you work in AI.”

Feedback isn’t going to dunk on this, because a large proportion of the people with access to the internet already have, and at this point it’s too easy. However, we will note that Sng has since deleted the post, and on 8 October : “Ok, enough jokes for a while. I’ll go back to reading bedtime stories for now.” The replies to this post suggest that people don’t believe he was joking.

The trouble is, of course, that the claims routinely made by AI bros are so over the top that it is hard to differentiate a parody from the real thing. The internet adage Poe’s law describes this phenomenon for extreme views, which are frequently so ridiculous that any parody must be clearly marked as such.

Perhaps we need a corollary, something like: “Without a blatant display of humour, it is utterly impossible to parody antisocial AI hype in such a way that it cannot be mistaken for the genuine article”. We could call it Sng’s law.

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.