Proposed Enhancement to Satellite Plugin

[Anthony Mallama]

Greetings,

Stellarium could fulfill an important need for professional and amateur astronomers who want to avoid streaks from bright satellites in their images. The app already has most of the required functionality in the satellite plugin. The proposed enhancement is an option to generate a list of sky coordinates along with magnitudes, ranges and heights for all satellites during a given time interval at a specified frequency.

I am an observing campaign leader for the International Astronomical Union’s Centre for the Protection of Dark and Quiet Skies from Satellite Constellation Interference. If this feature becomes available in Stellarium, I would promote it within the IAU CPS and beyond. My specialty is characterizing the brightness of satellites as described in this review article, https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14152.

Sincerely,

Tony Mallama

[Alexander V. Wolf]

Dear Tony,

пн, 15 апр. 2024 г. в 09:57, Anthony Mallama <anthony...@gmail.com>:

Stellarium could fulfill an important need for professional and amateur astronomers who want to avoid streaks from bright satellites in their images. The app already has most of the required functionality in the satellite plugin. The proposed enhancement is an option to generate a list of sky coordinates along with magnitudes, ranges and heights for all satellites during a given time interval at a specified frequency.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I fear this will be slow due to specifics of implementation of the plugin. Plus, we really will have some problems for implementation of the suggestion, because not all satellites has standard magnitude or RCS value. At least, I do not know a public source for standard magnitudes/RCS of satellites except Mike McCants' list of data.

 

I am an observing campaign leader for the International Astronomical Union’s Centre for the Protection of Dark and Quiet Skies from Satellite Constellation Interference. If this feature becomes available in Stellarium, I would promote it within the IAU CPS and beyond. My specialty is characterizing the brightness of satellites as described in this review article, https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14152.

Thanks for the link!

--

With best regards, Alexander

[Anthony Mallama]

Dear Alexander,

Slow execution time is not a problem. 

I have examined some Starlink and OneWeb magnitudes displayed in Stellarium. They are accurate enough to be useful. I think that Mike McCant’s RCS values can be used for other satellites.

Best,

Tony