Starlink-be-gone – How to get rid of satellite trails in deep space photos

Many years ago, it used to be the only thing astrophotographers worried about when shooting the night sky was cloud cover. Now, there are over 11,000 man-made satellites orbiting the planet – and we’re only going to get more over the coming years.

But YouTuber and deep space photographer Peter Zelinka has a quick and easy method to get rid of them. Now, you’re not going to be able to do this in Photoshop. You’re going to need PixInsight and its Weighted Batch Pre-Processing (WBPP) script.

What is PixInsight?

PixInsight is a software designed to process images of the night sky. When you take photos of stars and galaxies, they often don’t look great. They can be noisy, have weird colours, or just look dull due to light pollution. PixInsight helps you fix all that by giving you tools to clean up and enhance your images.

For example, you can stack multiple images. This helps to make faint details more visible or remove noise and artifacts. It also adjusts the colours to bring out the details of objects in space. It’s more technical than typical editing software because it’s purpose-built for astrophotography. It has a steep learning curve, but it’s very powerful.

This power isn’t free, though. You can get a 45-day free trial, but the full version is $300. So, you’re probably only going to be using this method if you’re serious about deep-sky photography.

I’m not afraid to admit that much of this methodology goes way over my head – astro isn’t my forte and I haven’t used this software yet. So, I’m not going to attempt to explain the technique. Peter does an excellent job of that himself in the video.

And the results he’s able to get from his images after running them through the software are very impressive. So, if you’re an astrophotographer who struggles with satellite trails in your images, it might be worth checking out.

How do you eliminate satellite streaks in your astrophotography?

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