alt Hacker NewsThe hard part came next. Larsen spent about 45 hours layering the individual photos – each of which contained about 25 satellites – over one another, using Adobe Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
This is less an "image of our satellite-choked night skies" and more "a completely mendacious image produced using Photoshop".
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These are actual images from a telescope with no photoshop: https://noirlab.edu/public/images/iau-ann19035a/ https://noirlab.edu/public/images/iotw1946a/
The image in the original post is not too far from what you get with an actual telescope.
I don't understand. Are you laboring under the impression that the artist is trying to convince people that this is what the night sky looks like at any given moment? What even are you upset about?
The point of the image is to make a point. Art is provocative. Our skies are choked as anyone who makes Astro images will tell you.
It did say he was a photographer, not an astronomer.
Surely an astronomer would have software for this that would produce a more accurate picture.
The photographer was completely transparent about how the image was produced and what it means.. how you manage to color this as dishonest is beyond me.
It’s called art.
Has he not heard of AI?
You 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.