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LEO satellites only cause problems around dusk and dawn, when they're exposed to light but the surface is not.

Because they're so close to the earth's surface it doesn't happen all night because they'll be in darkness too.

This simply isn't true. I do astrophotography, including traveling to dark skies so I can do wideband and not just narrowband. Plenty on the narrowband captures at home in b9 skies, too.

The long exposures pick up far more of them than I can see why my eyes, but I still end up seeing plenty of starlink satellites just looking up, even at 2 or 3 in the morning.

Huh weird, I wonder where they get the light from that reflects from them. The moon?

It wouldn't be possible for them to get direct sunlight that low during the middle of the night. Unless you are at very high latitudes in summer.

Some googling indicates that they're high enough that light refracting across the atmosphere will still hit them, and yeah, the moon, and also just some reflections from earth and airglow.

I've not done any real research here - it didn't seem odd to me that I could see them, so I haven't done any investigation at all here until these comments.

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