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by adgjlsfhk1 1424 days ago
This isn't correct for Starlink because a satellite can only obscure an object for a few seconds.
2 comments

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.

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