Shotwell's comment is extremely patronising under the circumstances. This doesn't affect kids looking through telescopes at all. If it's bright enough to see th

Shotwell's comment is extremely patronising under the circumstances. This doesn't affect kids looking through telescopes at all. If it's bright enough to see through an amateur telescope, it's bright enough to ruin a precision observation from a real instrument. A large part of the outcry is lack of tact from Spacex. Satellites in images is not new and has caused astronomers problems for a while. It's not common, but most people in the field know someone it's happened to.So now the issue is there will be an order of magnitude objects in space. Any kind of time series where you observe brightness over time would be affected by a satellite impinging the field. Spectroscopic measurements would also be affected. Astronomers use incredibly sensitive instruments looking for very faint objects - if a bright object is in the field of view, it can saturate the detector and ruin the image. For context some measurements, like imaging exoplanets, are so precise that you have to block the light from the (already faint) target star to see what's around it. In reality it's amateurs that can compensate with post processing. Professional astronomers are likely to just trash the data and try again. Then there are upcoming survey instruments like the LSST which take very wide angle images (I expect they already have some mitigation strategy becuase of other spacecraft). That said, the smaller your field of view, the lower the chance of a satellite impinging. One solution could be a mechanical shutter which could be activated when a satellite is about to impinge the field, or triggered by a database of satellite ephemirides.