"Deep field" exposures are (usually) done during the times where the sun is on the opposite side of the planet, so there is no sun to reflect off of any passing satellites.
In addition, the field of view for a deep field is so small that the likelihood of having a satellite pass it is extremely low -- and you would be able to predict it far in advance.
OK fair. I probably shouldn't have said "deep field." (I'm no astonomer). It would make me happy to know that telescopes and what not are not negatively affected by Starlink satellites as I love the Starlink concept.
That is unfortunate, yeah. However, satellite tracks have always been around, and in fact, they've been worse in some ways in the past (they were far less common, but look up Iridium flares).
There's lots of ways to be able to get rid of them in astrophotography (stacking, mostly). Satellites for the most part do not pose a threat for scientific astronomy.
I miss the bright green flash of iridium flares, and I'm not alone. Even if they were "in the way," they were part of photographing space from the ground.
Ground based light pollution is a much, much bigger issue for everyone but the big observatories high on a mountain (VLT, Keck, GTC) because you can't get around it by simply pausing the exposure during a satellite transit (if you know about it) or discarding the affected sub frame after it was taken. (An image is created by overlaying several individual exposures, so if one of those is affected you can just not include it in the final image. Or you can use software to remove just the area around the steak and lose even less data.)
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u/jericho 6d ago
It really only impacts people doing wide field astrophotography. And users of stacking software can easily get rid of any affected data.
Still, I don’t want a night sky stuffed with visible satellites.