How do satellites impede current telescopes? As we send up more and more satellites, it stands to reason that our view of the universe becomes more and more obscured. I would certainly expect for example that a large telescope such as the LSST would be able to see the International Space Station, and since the ISS is not transparent, it wouldn't be able to observe the patch of the sky beyond it.
How do current telescopes currently deal with satellites obstructing their view? Do they simply not observe where the satellite is? If we send up more and more satellites, does it mean that telescopes will have to focus on narrower and narrower fields of view to avoid the swarm?
Satellites, even in geostationary orbits, move with respect to the background stars and make &quot;trails&quot; on telescopic images that are tracked at the sidereal rate.
Removal of these can be as straightforward as taking the median of a set of exposures.
What I mean by this, is that in a sequence of exposures, the satellite trail will pollute different pixels in each exposure. Therefore if you take a sequence of exposures, tracked to keep stellar positions identical, then take the pixel-by-pixel median of the sequence of frames, the presence of the satellite will be removed. i.e. Each x,y pixel in your stacked image is formed by taking the median of the values of that pixel (scaled by the exposure time if necessary) in each image. It is essentially the same procedure by which cosmic ray strikes are removed.