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Comment by secondcoming | Hacker News Reader

That's great but sometimes it's nice to be able to see the stars unobstructed on a cloudless night.

Starlink doesn't stop you from doing that, the satellites are only visible when they are in direct sunlight (dusk and dawn).

For pure visual observation you might be right, but any sort of amateur astrophotography is already significantly affected and is only going to get worse because 1) it's usually more wide-field than in professional observatories, which significantly increases the chance of Starlink streaks and 2) the ~6.5 magnitude is still a lot brighter than all the interesting deep-sky objects and is only dimmer than stars visible to the human eye.

Amateur astrophotography usually stitches multiple short exposures together to simulate long exposure, where it's trivial to remove frames with streaks. You could also automatically detect the extent of the streaks and only remove those.

With guiding you're usually aiming for 5-10 minute exposures per frame. That usually results in each frame having at least several streaks. Sure, those are technically still short and can be cancelled out, but astrophotography is already challenging enough and has plenty of other noise sources without adding more fuel to the problem.

And that's now, when we're not close to the planned tens of thousands of satellites by Starlink above, and other vendors like Amazon only starting to plan their similar programs. That's why early feedback is important - otherwise the sky will be ruined in the best case for decades to come.

That's not prevented. Stars will be unobstructed on a cloudless night and further, are below visual magnitude of even the darkest night.

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