Comment by esikich
18 hours ago
That's what I don't understand, how are they ruined? If you're so deep that you need minutes or hours of exposures, that satellite will blip past the frame so fast it's not going to matter. And if the exposure time is less than that, you stack.
1. The satellite is usually significantly brighter than the thing you are observing. Often bright enough to saturate pixels (which can spill over to adjacent pixels).
2. If you are doing photometry (measuring the brightness of something), even if the relative brightness isn't very much, it can introduce a lot of noise to the data. For many things, even the dimmest satellite is going to add more light than the change in brightness you are looking for.
Now to be fair for scientific research typically you can use the frame if the streak isn't too close to your object(s) of interest. And for pretty pictures you can often edit out the streaks. But even so, it's a problem more than you would think.
Is this what you do? Because I'm at least an intermediate with astrophotography with a camera, and even airplanes are a total non issue. If you're so deep into the sky that you actually need many minutes or hours on the same spot, the teeny tiny time that satellite is there is a non issue and easy to remove with math.
Not any more. But in college I worked in an astronomy research group.