I have no problem with the image and it illustrates a real phenomena. There is something slightly misleading about it though: if you point a camera in the same direction for 2 hours, take many images and then layer the images you wouldn't have a static star background like is shown here. You'd only get that star background if you used a star tracker and kept pointing at the same place in the night sky but then the foreground would be changing.

No it is correct. I dabble in astrophotography.

The purpose of stacking hundreds of photos is to get rid of noise and unwanted trails like this.

The effort involved here is to go out of your way to do the exact opposite, specifically make sure things that are in a single exposure show up in the stack.

The image itself is interesting, but the context in which it’s presented in this article is dishonest.

The headline is the worst offender, saying that the skies are “choked” with satellites.

The headline is misleading. The photo alone is interesting with the right context.

If you do the exact opposite then? You take a very long exposure and you mask away the satellite trails and post the image as "image of how the satellites don't pollute the sky".. that's the exact same thing in reverse.

Both can't be non-misleading right?

> You have to edit things like this to reveal the signal

In this case, it seems like a desired noise was selectively amplified above signal level to portray an artificially low signal-to-noise ratio, with the article concluding "look at all this noise!"

Still a really neat picture though. Well done. I'm considering buying a print.

I also wonder if knowledge of a star map is sufficient to somehow automatically mask out the stars as the earth rotates, and let the trails show through with less effort, vs masking each trail.

> Art is provocative

The misleading part is that readers don’t see that it’s provocative art until you carefully read the details. It’s presented like documentary evidence of what the problem looks like.

The photographer might not have intended it this way, but the writers of this post took advantage of that.

I really like the photo and what it represents. We're growing as a civilization and I think that's beautiful.

Almost any astronomy processing software does this for free, because when you stack a whole load of images it rejects outlier pixels (e.g. a trail present on only one image out of hundreds).

It then usually gives you an image of both the combined success, and an image of just those pixels that were rejected. So, this.

An astronomer would presumably not erase the stars.