Astrosat: Forecasting satellite transits for optical astronomical observations
James Osborn, Laurence Blacketer, Matthew J. Townson, Ollie J. D. Farley
The impact of large-scale constellations of satellites, is a concern for ground-based astronomers. In recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of satellites in Low-Earth Orbit and this trend is set to continue. The large number of satellites increases the probability that one will enter the field of view of a ground-based telescope at the right solar angle to appear bright enough that it can corrupt delicate measurements. We present a new tool Astrosat that will project satellite orbits onto the RA/DEC coordinate system for a given observer location and time and field of view. This enables observers to mitigate the effects of satellite trails through their images by either avoiding the intersection, post-processing using the information as a prior or shuttering the observation for the duration of the transit. We also provide some analysis on the apparent brightness of the largest of the constellations, Starlink, as seen by a typical observatory and as seen with the naked eye. We show that a naked eye observer can typically expect to see a maximum of 5 Starlink satellites at astronomical twilight, when the sky is dark. With the intended 40000 satellites in the constellation, that number would increase to 30.
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Journal reference: MNRAS, Volume 509, Issue 2, January 2022, Pages 1848-1853
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stab3003
Cite as: arXiv:2111.11268 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2111.11268v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: James Osborn
[v1] Mon, 22 Nov 2021 15:11:29 UTC (637 KB)
