For the third night in a row there's been weather civil enough to spend a while in the backyard looking at the sky. (It was the mosquitos that drove me in. Mosquitos in the second week of October!)

I was trying to get a more interesting picture of Andromeda when I took this an hour or so ago. Andromeda is there (halfway across the top of the picture, mostly hidden by leaves), but far more interesting is the number of satellites. I count eight. Maybe you see more. That's satellites travelling across a pretty tiny piece of sky during an exposure of 1.6 seconds.

You can count on all of them either being privately owned or serving to protect capital rights. In the 21st century, we mere human beings don't own the sky; capital does.