It's like finding a needle in a haystack. Find an extremely tiny object (relatively speaking) in millions of square miles of ocean. A carrier is fast. 30+ knot

It's like finding a needle in a haystack. Find an extremely tiny object (relatively speaking) in millions of square miles of ocean. A carrier is fast. 30+ knot speed, likely more (top speed is classified.) Going with 30 knots gives you 720 nautical mile radius of action, or 2,156,746 square miles. This is to say nothing of the satellite's capabilities, or the back-end systems needed to find objects in the photographs. There's better ways to go about it though, and the open source satellites taking photos are probably the worst for this job, to be brutally honest. But some examples: The Soviets use to fly radar satellites to search for US carrier groups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A The Chinese are suspected to have their own satellites for this purpose, though they are passive in nature, searching for electromagnetic emissions from the ships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaogan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaogan (Look up EMCON on how this is countered.) But in short, it yes a carrier can still hide, though it's tricky. And this is without active measures being taken. And the Carrier Group Commander will have intelligence notifying them of when the overhead passes are. With that, they can start piecing together what the kill chain looks like, from getting that data down to the ground, the time it takes their analysts to find the carrier in it, get that data to command, and then down to the assets to take action against it, plan a sortie, and get the weapon out to where it is...during all that time of which the carrier is free to maneuver and take other counter measures. It becomes a game of cat and mouse. It's rather dated now, but the classic book "Red Storm Rising" illustrates some of this and how it plays out.