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by spacemark 2150 days ago
The most common algorithm to manage airplanes, satellites, hot pixels, and other undesired photons in astrophotos is a process called Kappa-Sigma Clipping. It essentially rejects pixel values from subframes in your image stack that fall outside a user-inputted deviation from the mean.

In other words, the process works wonderfully to get rid of the starlink-emitted photons, but you lose that subframe's signal, lowering your signal to noise ratio. Not the end of the world. But inconvenient and sometimes costly to professional astronomers.

1 comments

Yeah, but what % of subframes (small portions of large images) are ruined by noise caused by moving objects? Way less than 1% I'd imagine. It's just not a big problem. And certainly not worth outlawing new satellite launches over.