It did say he was a photographer, not an astronomer.

Surely an astronomer would have software for this that would produce a more accurate picture.

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.

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cperciva 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

An astronomer would presumably not erase the stars.

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Kevin_Flynn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was thinking the field of astronomy would need to survey the satellites, in order to make sure it doesn't interere with any of their observations of the stars.

So, they would erase the stars, but only to create a satellite mask, generally speaking.

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misnome 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Actually, this is pretty common for non-scientific astrophotography! Erase Stars -> Edit background and stars colour, contrast etc separately -> Recombine!

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SiempreViernes 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why not? Stars are boring, the cool things are galaxies.

	▲	cgriswald an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps ironically there are times when astronomers “erase” galaxies. Erasing things is routine to get at the things you want.