Re:How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astrono...
by crazygringo on Thursday August 27, 2020 @03:47PM
(#24297823)
No, that's not how that works at all.
Remember, astronomy images generally have long exposure times, which already involve tracking the sky, and then averaging out values in the exposure across minutes/hours/days/whatever.
A satellite passing over a point in the sky means that area of sky is affected for only a tiny fraction of the total exposure. As long as you have a database of all satellite locations, you just don't include data from those time slices in the final average. Or if you don't know where satellites are in advance, you just do basic outlier detection -- the kind that already eliminates things like airplanes, birds, the ISS, etc.
Nobody's filling in anything with "black", and the area of satellite interference can be easily expanded to include the "glow" area.
In the end, the quality of the overall image is degraded by a tiny fraction of a percentage, which can be trivially overcome by extending the total exposure time by the same tiny fraction of a percentage.
Remember, astronomy images generally have long exposure times, which already involve tracking the sky, and then averaging out values in the exposure across minutes/hours/days/whatever.
A satellite passing over a point in the sky means that area of sky is affected for only a tiny fraction of the total exposure. As long as you have a database of all satellite locations, you just don't include data from those time slices in the final average. Or if you don't know where satellites are in advance, you just do basic outlier detection -- the kind that already eliminates things like airplanes, birds, the ISS, etc.
Nobody's filling in anything with "black", and the area of satellite interference can be easily expanded to include the "glow" area.
In the end, the quality of the overall image is degraded by a tiny fraction of a percentage, which can be trivially overcome by extending the total exposure time by the same tiny fraction of a percentage.