[SiempreViernes]

Yes they are very much possible, and cheaper than space too.

What starlink does is ruin part of the images, and if the thing you were interested in observing happens to be blocked by a starlink trail you're hosed: a thing literally blocked what you tried to see and you lost the nigh (because usually you get just a bit of the a night for your observation). Other things that ruins your night is clouds, so starlink effectively makes the weather at a site worse, only you find out after the night that it was all a waste.

To some extent you can plan around it, but as the mega constellations grow they'll have to avoid each other more frequently and there's no rules for how that shits coordinated, so you maybe you can know in advance that the night is wasted.

But the risk that a satellite is in an undocumented orbit by the time you try to observe will likely be very high in the future.

[adgjlsfhk1]

This isn't correct for Starlink because a satellite can only obscure an object for a few seconds.

[SiempreViernes]

Have you taken a photo while someone else used a flash? The flash is also only on for a fraction of the camera exposure but you sure as hell notice when it happened and it went off close to what you wanted to depict you will just have to take a new photo.

The length of the occlusion isn't very relevant when the thing going in front is orders of magnitudes brighter than what you are trying to observe.

Example: https://imgb.srgcdn.com/5i9W2KZAXha7p27YHHR2.png?width=1024 good luck extracting any data from behind that flash.

[ncmncm]

How does the telescope know it is "obscured" by something local, and not legitimately fluctuating?

[adgjlsfhk1]

a leo telescope doesn't look anything like a star (mainly because it's moving too fast). the way you deal with this is by not taking hour long exposures, and instead take thousands of second long exposures. then you can composite them all together, cropping out the bits that look like satellites from each frame. it's a little annoying, but pretty easy to automate.