Re:How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astrono...
by welterde on Thursday August 27, 2020 @12:06PM
(#24295044)
If no light falls onto the detector then there is no blooming. And of course there will be diffraction from the shutter edges as well, so engineering it will be quite a challenge (one can take hints from coronographs). If the satellites does end up on the sensor then the dimension of the streak depends on the optics, how bright it is, the used detector, plate scale, etc. (if you are extremely unlucky you might have internal reflections too and they might end up who knows where on the detector - optics is hard).
I think you could mitigate the problems with conditions changing if (instead of blocking out the streak in the image with some per-area shutter) you tracked the satellite in the image with a horizontal (or vertical) shutter stripe which has the right width to cover the entire satellite. This would make the data lost really minor, and changing conditions wouldn't be a problem, and the exposure would be even. Does that make sense?