How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images

Re:How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astrono... by Balgair on Thursday August 27, 2020 @11:27AM (#24294620)

To reinforce this, there is a fair bit of astronomy that is looking for single photon differences. The optics and engineering here is very cool (pun intended) and can take months of time on an instrument to detect, if there is anything at all. Sources of noise are pathologically chased down. Adding in noise would be like trying to chop off your arm, easy to do once, but hard to undo.

As a reminder, astronomy is not as much about the 'image' as it is about the 'measurement'. Editing pictures like in Insta is not the point here, you can't fill things in.

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Re:How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astrono... by dylan604 on Thursday August 27, 2020 @01:37PM (#24296242)

Exactly. Modern day comet/asteroid hunters are taking images from night after night and treating them like time lapses to see what dots are moving. Removing these dots to fill in the void left by the satellite streaks sets this method of detection back to unusable/unreliable. Even filling in the removed satellite streaks in an image with data from previous/next images totally invalidates the tracking of objects in motion.

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