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In the question How fast do optical surfaces get dirty or damaged in space? I've written:

Answers to Accumulated environmental damage to Hubble main mirror are inconclusive, and this (deleted) answer to the question Do we have a photo of a micrometeorite impact on a lens? shows a Tim Peake tweet of a meteor impact on a window of the ISS, which for the purposes of this question won't qualify as full fledged optical surface, part of an optical system.

Is it impolite to link to the deleted answer in this way? I can think of two ways that it could be:

  1. the author of the self-deleted post deleted it and doesn't want (many) people to see it (though higher rep users still do)
  2. lower rep users can't see it and may then feel "left out" because something referred to in my question is being withheld from them.

I've done it this way to give credit to the user who made the post and found the resource, and to increase visibility of the information within the post to at least some users.

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When possible, links should be accessible to everyone. This goes for paywalled resources, but IMO it also applies in this case.

Pinging the user who wrote the deleted answer is a good approach.

In this particular case, the deleted answer is still off-topic so I'd rather not undelete it. But the question also contains a link to the photo you want, so I've added the photo there.

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    $\begingroup$ Thanks for your speedy reply! I'm thinking that now I should modify my question and just point to the recently updated question itself. $\endgroup$ – uhoh May 15 at 7:19
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    $\begingroup$ On the other hand, if you link to a post that later becomes deleted, I would say it would be fine to leave the link but add a note saying that it was deleted. $\endgroup$ – called2voyage♦ May 15 at 13:10
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    $\begingroup$ I'm a bit slow on this, but I've modified the question accordingly. $\endgroup$ – uhoh Jun 5 at 21:19

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