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Plugin to avoid LEO satellite time?

Astronomy tools
4 replies•109 views
Bill McLaughlin avatar
Bill McLaughlin avatar

I am sure we all have the same frustration and that is the ever increasing number of frames polluted by satellites. Sure, you can remove most with rejection or manually but clean frames are always better.

Since the vast majority are LEO satellites and those are proliferating at the most alarming rate and since those stop reflecting at some point each night depending on altitude, latitude, and time of day and year, it would seem that there could be (and maybe is?) a plugin for NINA and/or other software that would allow one to automatically avoid “LEO time” perhaps doing narrowband instead of Lum or RGB if not avoiding entirely.

Doe anyone know of such software?

It would also be nice to have an AI program to remove satellites from subframes automatically. That combined with rejection would be better than rejection alone, especially for small numbers of subs. It should be a task well suited to AI but if anyone has done this, I must have missed it.

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Tony Gondola avatar
Tony Gondola avatar

Honestly, I’ve been finding that rejection takes care of everything except low flying aircraft but i suppose wide fov set ups will be more affected than mine. I would certainly avoid shooting to the west in the early hours of the evening and to the east in the morning.

SASPro does have a sat. remover that can work on a file batch so that might fill the bill for wiping all your subs clean before processing. I don’t see it under the SAS scripts in PI so you’ll have to do it through SASPro.

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alpheratz06 avatar
alpheratz06 avatar

To complement Tony's answer, I think that clipping algorithms provide very good , if not excellent rejection.

The current density of LEO objects is such that I don't think optical interference avoidance is possible by managing time windows, especially if you use longer exposure or wide FOV.

Theoretically, there is no problem to predict satellite crossing, but I am not sure that managing those windows will be helpful from a practical standpoint.

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Tony Gondola avatar
Tony Gondola avatar

Practically I suppose it would be possible to implement as a NINA plug-in with the system knowing where the telescope is pointed, FOV and what its position is on the ground, it should be possible to make predictions on when a known object passes through the FOV and to interrupt imaging accordingly. How productive, useful or how much of an improvement that might be in practice remains to be seen.

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TiffsAndAstro avatar
TiffsAndAstro avatar

It would best to avoid them, but only more are coming.

Seti astro has a free removal tool, but rejection stacking seems to work well provided you have 30 or more subs.

15 trails in a 5 mins sub is my personal best, I guess you have even more :(