Warning: that viral Orion Nebula photo from last week has a hidden satellite trail

I zoomed in on the full resolution version and found a faint streak right through the Trapezium cluster that nobody mentioned. Anyone else catch this in their own astrophotos from that same night?

3 comments

3 Comments

smith.elliot5d agoMost Upvoted

Alice928 is missing the point entirely. That streak lines up perfectly with known Starlink passes from that night, and if you check the color data, it shows up in all three channels (not just one, which a hot pixel would do). It's not about the streak itself ruining the photo, it's about how every "clean" viral space image now has this stuff baked in and nobody bothers to point it out until someone like OP actually looks.

emma_garcia5d ago

Elliot nailed it, I ran the same check on my own data from that night and found the same streak in the luminance stack, clear as day across all three filters. Stuff like this is why I've started checking every viral space photo myself because the satellites are just everywhere now even in narrowband shots. It's exhausting having to explain to people that no, it's not a sensor artifact, it's literally a train of internet satellites crossing a nebula.

alice9286d ago

Bet you its not even a satellite trail, probably just a hot pixel or some dust on the sensor that nobody noticed until you zoomed in at 400%. Those full res versions get processed through like five different algorithms before anyone posts them, stuff gets added and removed all the time. And even if it is a real satellite, whats the big deal, satellites cross deep sky objects literally every night, the only reason this went viral is because someone with too much time on their hands found a tiny line and made a whole thing out of it.