The image in the original post is not too far from what you get with an actual telescope.
Even if I were to be as charitable as possible to your interpretation, "mendacious" is way too strong a word, and implies an unreasonable bitterness.
The purpose of stacking hundreds of photos is to get rid of noise and unwanted trails like this.
The effort involved here is to go out of your way to do the exact opposite, specifically make sure things that are in a single exposure show up in the stack.
The headline is the worst offender, saying that the skies are “choked” with satellites.
The headline is misleading. The photo alone is interesting with the right context.
But the framing from others is terrible. "Who gave anyone permission do this?" Um, every single satellite ever launched has gone through government approvals. Sorry if you didn't start paying attention to the world of space flight until it ruined your attempt at photography, but that's on you.
Both can't be non-misleading right?
Surely an astronomer would have software for this that would produce a more accurate picture.
It then usually gives you an image of both the combined success, and an image of just those pixels that were rejected. So, this.
The misleading part is that readers don’t see that it’s provocative art until you carefully read the details. It’s presented like documentary evidence of what the problem looks like.
The photographer might not have intended it this way, but the writers of this post took advantage of that.
The misleading part is where he edited out the stars by hand.
> Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
The photographer wasn’t misleading. He made a cool photo. The headline is misleading.