Re:How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astrono...
by dylan604 on Thursday August 27, 2020 @10:12AM
(#24293880)
I love all of the comments about using software to filter out the images. This response is so obvious that it is from someone who has never worked with data from imaging the sky, and probably have never thought about it more than a drive-by comment. "Just filter it out" they say. And replace it with what? An average of near by pixels? An AI background replacement? That's just bollocks. Every single dot in the sky is another star, galaxy, planet, asteroid, etc. They are not blemishes in the image. To just write them off would be like drawing a map of the earth without New Zealand on it.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astrono...
by Balgair on Thursday August 27, 2020 @11:27AM
(#24294620)
To reinforce this, there is a fair bit of astronomy that is looking for single photon differences. The optics and engineering here is very cool (pun intended) and can take months of time on an instrument to detect, if there is anything at all. Sources of noise are pathologically chased down. Adding in noise would be like trying to chop off your arm, easy to do once, but hard to undo.
As a reminder, astronomy is not as much about the 'image' as it is about the 'measurement'. Editing pictures like in Insta is not the point here, you can't fill things in.
Re:How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astrono...
by dylan604 on Thursday August 27, 2020 @01:37PM
(#24296242)
Exactly. Modern day comet/asteroid hunters are taking images from night after night and treating them like time lapses to see what dots are moving. Removing these dots to fill in the void left by the satellite streaks sets this method of detection back to unusable/unreliable. Even filling in the removed satellite streaks in an image with data from previous/next images totally invalidates the tracking of objects in motion.
Re:How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astrono...
by verytrivial on Friday August 28, 2020 @08:34AM
(#24304084)
.. and I have given up chasing down the 'JuSt UsE SpaCE teLeScoPEs' comments. These people would write off the loss of New Zealand as the market simply finding the right benefit-cost ratio.