alt Hacker NewsYou are being uncharitable. There is nothing misleading about this, or any other, nightsky timeseries image. It claims to show the paths of satellites over 2 hours, and that's what it does. You have to edit things like this to reveal the signal and keep relatively constant elements from overwhelming the result. Astronomers do this exact same thing (erasing things that obscure the subject over time).
Even if I were to be as charitable as possible to your interpretation, "mendacious" is way too strong a word, and implies an unreasonable bitterness.
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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.
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.