Starship Asterisk*

[quote="neufer"][quote="Chris Peterson"][quote="ta152h0"]

if a sattelite was placed on the midnight side of the Earth, at what distance would it have to pace the Earth and suffer a total solar eclipse ? That would make the sky dark where it is always too bright to observe the stars on that hemisphere, woul it not ?[/quote]
You mean you want the satellite to always be in the Earth's shadow? That's not an Earth orbit at all, it's a solar orbit (unstable) a bit beyond the Earth that takes one year to complete. It's at the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point #2. However, it's too far from the Earth to totally block the Sun, so you actually have an annular eclipse. With active station keeping (burning a lot of fuel) you could get closer to the Earth and maintain a non-Keplerian orbit around the Sun with a period of a year, in order to be in permanent darkness.[/quote]
Alternatively, the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point #2 space station could drop a 100,000 km long tether in the direction
of Earth with an eclipse probe at the end. (Or a much much shorter tether with an occulting disk at the end.)[/quote]
Occulting shields are already used by probes that are placed at L[sub]2[/sub] (or more technically, in orbits around L[sub]2[/sub]).

[quote="Chris Peterson"][quote="ta152h0"]

if a sattelite was placed on the midnight side of the Earth, at what distance would it have to pace the Earth and suffer a total solar eclipse ? That would make the sky dark where it is always too bright to observe the stars on that hemisphere, woul it not ?[/quote]
You mean you want the satellite to always be in the Earth's shadow? That's not an Earth orbit at all, it's a solar orbit (unstable) a bit beyond the Earth that takes one year to complete. It's at the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point #2. However, it's too far from the Earth to totally block the Sun, so you actually have an annular eclipse. With active station keeping (burning a lot of fuel) you could get closer to the Earth and maintain a non-Keplerian orbit around the Sun with a period of a year, in order to be in permanent darkness.[/quote]
Alternatively, the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point #2 space station could drop a 100,000 km long tether in the direction
of Earth with an eclipse probe at the end. (Or a much much shorter tether with an occulting disk at the end.)

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[quote="ta152h0"]if a sattelite was placed on the midnight side of the Earth, at what distance would it have to pace the Earth and suffer a total solar eclipse ? That would make the sky dark where it is always too bright to observe the stars on that hemisphere, woul it not ?[/quote]
You mean you want the satellite to always be in the Earth's shadow? That's not an Earth orbit at all, it's a solar orbit (unstable) a bit beyond the Earth that takes one year to complete. It's at the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point #2. However, it's too far from the Earth to totally block the Sun, so you actually have an annular eclipse. With active station keeping (burning a lot of fuel) you could get closer to the Earth and maintain a non-Keplerian orbit around the Sun with a period of a year, in order to be in permanent darkness.

At 0:38 in the video it is neat to watch the Moon move slightly leftward against the starry background, but the Earth's shadow remains fixed.

[quote="ta152h0"]

if a sattelite was placed on the midnight side of the Earth, at what distance would it have to pace the Earth and suffer a total solar eclipse ? That would make the sky dark where it is always too bright to observe the stars on that hemisphere, woul it not ?[/quote]
Can't quite follow that ...please restate question.

if a sattelite was placed on the midnight side of the Earth, at what distance would it have to pace the Earth and suffer a total solar eclipse ? That would make the sky dark where it is always too bright to observe the stars on that hemisphere, woul it not ?

[url=https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180128.html][img]https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/calendar/S_180128.jpg[/img] [size=150]A Total Lunar Eclipse Over Tajikistan[/size][/url]

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