While the satellite trails haven’t changed in brightness, their rate has approximately doubled. The team found trails in every three to four hours of Hubble data taken in 2002.

The tool works by looking for trails in images from one of Hubble’s cameras, the Advanced Camera for Surveys. This camera has a very wide field of view, meaning it captures a large portion of ...

A typical satellite trail is "relatively thin," taking up some five to 10 pixels in a Hubble image — about 0.5% of the photo's total pixel count, according to Stark.

It turns out satellite trails are not as much of an issue for that telescope as they are for others. That’s because there’s a trick available for HST image calibration, according to Dave Stark ...

Satellite trails interfere with long-exposure images of stars and galaxies. It is vital that we can continue to observe the universe from Earth without peering through a haze of artificial lights.

Additionally, the probability of finding satellite trails in Hubble images has increased with time from 3.7% in 2002 to 5.9% in 2021.

That means satellite fraction for the Advanced Camera Survey/Wide-Field Channel (ACS/WFC) affected increased from 2.8 ± 0.2 percent in 2002-2005 to 4.3 ± 0.4 percent in 2018-2021, for example.

Wider trails from satellites passing closer to the telescope can't. The satellite's brightness can also wash out fainter objects. Contributed / NASA, ESA, Kruk et al., Nature 2023 ...

03 March 2023 SpaceX satellites and others are marring Hubble’s vision A rising number of images by the famed telescope include satellite trails — a trend that will ultimately affect its science.