<story><title>Stacked images of the comet, photobombed by Starlink satellites</title><url>https://twitter.com/djulik/status/1286053695956881409</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>irthomasthomas</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s trivial to erase these things from photos. The photographer no doubt knows this, but that isn&amp;#x27;t the point.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s perfectly reasonable for scientists to want to capture accurate data on the space surrounding the main subject being imaged. Simply erasing the satellites from photos does not recover the data on the space behind. Any data from behind the satellites is lost forever. This photo keeps the satellites in order to visually demonstrate this problem.&lt;p&gt;Remember that astronomy today is often done on a single pixel of data. Starlink blocks multiple pixels, and even ruins entire exposures when they flare up. This will make astronomical research, like searching for exoplanets, far harder and more expensive than it is today. Space telescopes are, and will always be, orders of magnitude more expensive than ground telescopes to launch, maintain and operate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kbenson</author><text>If the images are stacked, doesn&amp;#x27;t that mean that there&amp;#x27;s plenty of images with the parts that are occluded in others not occluded?&lt;p&gt;I understand for any specific image, there&amp;#x27;s going to be some lost background because of Starlink satellites, but that&amp;#x27;s not what this is showing, this is showing something that&amp;#x27;s not possible, right?  Shifting all the satellites temporally so they appear together, &lt;i&gt;arbitrarily maximizing the problem beyond what is real&lt;/i&gt; isn&amp;#x27;t an accurate depiction of the problem, IMO.&lt;p&gt;Put another way, if you erase the Starlink satellites from the images &lt;i&gt;before&lt;/i&gt; stacking them, you then get a fairly accurate representation of the sky without any Starlink satellites, and you still have the data behind them (from the other pictures where that portion of the sky was not occluded).  You can also probably fix the intensity of anything occluded in a few of the pictures but not others through some math.</text></comment>
<story><title>Stacked images of the comet, photobombed by Starlink satellites</title><url>https://twitter.com/djulik/status/1286053695956881409</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>irthomasthomas</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s trivial to erase these things from photos. The photographer no doubt knows this, but that isn&amp;#x27;t the point.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s perfectly reasonable for scientists to want to capture accurate data on the space surrounding the main subject being imaged. Simply erasing the satellites from photos does not recover the data on the space behind. Any data from behind the satellites is lost forever. This photo keeps the satellites in order to visually demonstrate this problem.&lt;p&gt;Remember that astronomy today is often done on a single pixel of data. Starlink blocks multiple pixels, and even ruins entire exposures when they flare up. This will make astronomical research, like searching for exoplanets, far harder and more expensive than it is today. Space telescopes are, and will always be, orders of magnitude more expensive than ground telescopes to launch, maintain and operate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nsilvestri</author><text>Exposures are generally taken frequently enough that any that would be problematic for data can simply be dropped. The satellites aren&amp;#x27;t permanently positioned in the sky. Geostationary satellites permanently lose any data behind them (although I haven&amp;#x27;t heard of a geostationary satellite being positioned precisely problematically).</text></comment>