Foreign Stars, Dawn Sisters, and the ISS

Unless it's important to the plot, a lot of science fiction writers forget a basic fact:

Significant orbital hardware is often visible from the planet surface. People already play satellite spotting now - it's likely to be just like plane spotting if we start building space hotels and the like.

People including me - I was fortunate enough on Friday to get a very clear view of the ISS as it passed over. Clear as in I could make out the solar panels naked eye. There can't have been much moisture in the sky at all.

I can think of two series right now in which orbital hardware observations get interesting.

One is C.J. Cherryh's ridiculously long (but brilliant) Foreigner series. The native atevi perceive the arriving colony ship as a foreign star from which the humans then descend on petals (parachutes).

The other is Pern, where the three ships that brought the colonists have been abandoned in geo stationary orbit and become the Dawn Sisters, fixed "stars" that sailors use for navigation.

Here's the small issue:

There's no mistaking the ISS for a star. Now, true, the ISS is in low earth orbit, not really that high up at all. Which also means it has a higher relative motion.

But even with the naked eye, it is clearly not a disk. Unless your orbital hardware is perfectly round, then it's not going to be mistaken for a star.

It's more likely that your aliens or colonists will put it in an object category of its own. They might not know what the heck it is, but... For example, the Dawn Sisters were large colony ships. While it's possible they were spherical, it's much more likely that they were cigar shaped and given the size could have easily been determined as such naked eye. It did take the reinvention of telescopes to work out what they actually were. But stars? Nah.

And don't forget that orbital hardware is visible from the planet below. Even small satellites can be tracked with a telescope.

The ISS is about the size of a football field in total, 356 feet by 240 feet. For a sci fi contrast, the Enterprise D is 2,108 feet long (the Federation should never have agreed not to develop or use cloaking devices!). Babylon 5 is 5 miles long. That's how big a large station is. Now, admittedly, a station like that would be best located at a Lagrange point. In our system the primary station for Earth would be at L4 or L5 (In the Transpecial universe the L4 and L5 points are occupied by Launchpad, Earth's primary shipyard, and a large trading station respectively). That's about the same distance from Earth as the moon is. A five mile long Lagrange station would be naked eye visible and would probably show some shape, bearing in mind that on a very clear night you can see Venus' disk.

So, when writing about advanced planets, don't forget that you can see that honking great station from the planet it serves, assuming you know where to look. It's up to you how this affects life on the planet, but at the very least you can imagine a kid in their back yard, possibly with a set of binoculars,  with an app on their phone (or whatever equipment they are using) to tell them which station is which. "Daddy! I saw a ship dock!"

Humans like to find and observe things. It's part of what makes us human. Don't forget that.