SpaceX satellites' effect on night sky can't be eliminated, astronomers say:
Broadband satellites being launched by SpaceX and other companies will inevitably have a negative impact on astronomers' ability to observe the night sky, according to a new report by astronomers. There are no mitigation strategies that can completely eliminate the satellites' impact on astronomical observations—other than not launching satellites at all—but the report includes recommendations for how satellite operators can minimize disruption and how observatories can adjust to the changes.
The report released this week is titled, "Impact of Satellite Constellations on Optical Astronomy and Recommendations Toward Mitigations."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2020, @09:17PM (1 child)
Yes, and we'll just fill in the obscured sections with random data. This just in: purple oblong planet discovered less than ten nanoparsecs away!
And how much of the night sky does, say, a newborn star in the Andromeda cluster occupy?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 30 2020, @01:30AM
If you are observing a distant object with a smaller than satellite radial measurement, you simply throw out those frames while the satellite is crossing.
This is many many orders of magnitude simpler than correcting atmospheric distortions, and has zero hardware requirements.
Every backyard geek with a CCD on their scope post processes more complex problems in software all the time, "professionals" who spend all their time doing observation and sharing data could develop predictive satellite tracking software among themselves, in fact, they already have for all the junk that's already up there - this is just adding more lines to the database table.
🌻🌻 [google.com]