[Retric]

You misunderstand the issue. It’s a significant problem for some kinds of observations and largely irrelevant to others.

Satellites don’t include light sources and there’s nothing to illuminate them when in earth’s shadow. In order to interfere with light based astronomy they need to be outside of earths shadow and someone needs to be actively taking a picture of that chunk of sky. As these satellites orbit close to earth almost the entire sky is clear near solar midnight.

Major ground based telescopes can also add a shutter to block light detection for the fraction of a second a satellite would interfere. Basically at increasing magnification you’re looking at an ever smaller percentage of the sky which means the odds of a satellite, even one of millions, being in the shot for a given second is low. It’s still an issue, but being 99.X% as effective is good enough not to be a major concern.

Where it’s a concern is whole sky observation where you can’t easily add a shutter and losing a significant portion of the sky every night is a real problem. Amateur astronomy has the same basic options, but will often run into avoidable issues.

[theresistor]

In most amateur imaging you can trade time for quality. By stacking enough images, satellite trails get averaged out of the final image.

Very high end amateurs get pissy about it because they paid a lot of money for high end equipment to minimize imaging times, but for the rest of us it’s not a huge impediment as we already needed lots of subframes to get high SNR anyways.

[dredmorbius]

Averaging isn't the only option. It's possible to use other image-processing techniques which look at outlier values. This is way outside my area of expertise, but I believe sigma clipping is one of the standard go-tos, see:

<https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Sigma...>.

More generally, you're clipping outliers:

<https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Clipp...>.

This applies not only to satellite tracks, but meteors, cosmic rays, and other artefacts introduced into image capture. The techniques should be generally applicable, though for those who are specifically exploring transitory phenomena, this introduces additional challenges.

[Retric]

That’s an option. However, these satellites provide a predictable path so you don’t needed to detect them from image data. Which means you can even prevent them from showing up on long analog film exposures.