“Removal” here means “masking”—the pixels under the bright streaks will always be scientifically unusable because the streaks inflate the noise irrevocably. (Yo

“Removal” here means “masking”—the pixels under the bright streaks will always be scientifically unusable because the streaks inflate the noise irrevocably. (You can’t see stars in the daytime by “removing” the sun.) The 7th magnitude limit just minimizes the streak signal cross-talk through the rest of the camera. It also means the satellites are invisible to the naked eye.