Getting hammered by satellites!!

[barx1963]

Doing an imaging run on the Leo Triplet at the moment. My subs are getting hammered by satellites, most trails in one 5 minute sub was 5 and 50% of all subs are getting something.All travelling in one direction, west to east as far as I can tell. I can probably count on one hand the number of subs I have lost from trails in the last 12 months.

Anyone else having similar issues??

Malcolm

[glend]

Starlink just launched another 60.

[multiweb]

Looks like the black paint has come off.

[The_bluester]

I had the same thing recently but worked out that where I was imaging covered the typical orbits of geostationary sats, I hardly got a streak free sub all night.

[barx1963]

I thought of that but assumedgeostationary ones would be very close to equator? My target is at declination 13 degrees N.

[billdan]

Aren't Geo-stationary satellites locked in position over the continent its covering, like the Foxtel satellite?
So you shouldn't see them move, I had an idea of using the Foxtel Sat as an artificial star for scope testing, but never got around to it.

[The_bluester]

Geostationary sats sit more or less still in alt-az, so they drift through images at the RA rate.

I say more or less still as some of them have somewhat inclined orbits so they wander back and forward in Dec over an orbit.

[barx1963]

Yes, but they move against the background sky so you still get streaks.

Malcolm

[billdan]

Thanks Paul and Malcolm, I'm "Thick as a Brick" sometimes. :screwy:

[OICURMT]

This got me thinking... is there any software that can list the number of satellites expected in a FoV (& which ones) during an imaging session?


I use kstars/ekos, but can't find anything that does predictive modelling for satellites intersecting a target (field).

[lazjen]

Take enough subs and use good dithering it shouldn't be much of an issue?

[multiweb]

:lol: There's a market for a plugin to shut the camera shutter momentarily when there's a "constellation" flyby.

[barx1963]

Which is exactly what I am getting. I am even seeing a couple that appear in 2 images, with the streak cutting off near the middle of the frame a starting near that point in the next frame.

I am guessing that as geostationary satellites orbit at about 35,800km above sea level above the equator, then at 38deg South, we would see them north of the celestial equator?

[barx1963]

Yeah, I increased my dither as some of the streaks were several pixels wide so needed to make sure they disappear in processing. Will find out later today how successful I was!!

[The_bluester]

It was around M61 in my case and just having a look back at some data, the satellites show up at about +5 Dec for me. I had a look in Stellarium and the Leo triplet looks to get absolutely hammered by satellites, it must be on the edge of the inclination where they park the geostationary ones.

[barx1963]

Yep, the Triplet was just awful, went and got a few subs on M61 and it had a few as well. Turned out it may be a wasted effort in the end. The Triplet data looked OK, but when I had processed, it had a massive gradient from the lights of Geelong (I now live on southern edge of Geelong) I thought I would be able to process the gradient out but ended up with horrible artifacts all over the masters. 6 hours of exposures and nothing to show!! The good news was that Pixinsight had no issues getting rid of the satellite trails!

[OICURMT]

Hmmm... if I only had the time (and skills)... :sadeyes:

[NorthernLight]

Isn’t there someone with a petition to stop Musk polluting space with more of this junk? I’m really starting to hate his ideas. Not enough that we have to put up with LED lights as bright as day. Now we have to deal with this satellite orgy as well. Not even dark skies are a remedy here anymore. Isn’t there something like a basic human right to undisturbed night skies? This day and age really has a right to all sorts of minority driven cultural sensitivities but apparently space is on no ones agenda.

[The_bluester]

Yeah, there is, at least one, probably many. I would expect them to be as effective as any other internet petition. The only thing that will save us from thousands of Starlink sats would be bankruptcy of SpaceX, and even then someone else would probably swoop in, buy the lot for a song and keep going.

[billdan]

ONEWEB (British) launched 74 satellites in Feb/Mar 2020 (was planned to be a total of 650) and then immediately filed for bankruptcy in late March due to Covid-19.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneWeb_satellite_constellation

[Emuhead]

Serious question, if you have several subs, wouldnt these just get 'averaged out' of the final image when stacking? If not, then i really hope some clever people are working on software that just removes these streaks from images. If i have streaks in my images, i tend to leave them in the pile and most of the time they are removed as part of the stacking process.

[The_bluester]

Yes, you can stack them out to a pretty fair degree, the problem comes when there are so many that they start to coincide on multiple exposures and skew the average or median figure.