Posts Made By: Mark Jordan

Unfortunately it was overcast over my location on the 21st!  Didn't clear up any until long after Jupiter and Saturn had sunk below the horizon, but I went ahead and got out on the 22nd.  Kind of a day late and time short, I had about 20 minutes to try to get an image before they would be in the "no zone" again.   Used the latest greatest OSC with a 462c sensor and an F4 12" Newtonian I was still able to fit both planets in the senor frame on the 22nd.

Hi Michael,

I have had several imaging sessions in the past year+ StarLink gremlins have come to visit, but they do not seem to be much of an overall problem in my regular multi-subframe acquisitions for calibrations and stacking.  I may get anywhere from 3 - 5 subframes with StarLink streaking through flipping me off, but they are pretty easily culled out during the post preprocessing inspections of the preprocessed images prior to final stacking and post processing of an image.  I've even tried a little experimentation by leaving the little buggers still in the stack and integrating the whole pile with Pixinsight's integration function.  I used "Adaptive Normalization"  along with either Winsorized Sigma, or Percentile clipping (depending on the number of subframes) in the pixel rejection and drizzle files in the Integration function.  Doing that has also managed to wipe their trails from the finished post processed image, the larger the number of subframes you acquire and use in the processing the more effective and better the integration algorithm deals with neutralizing their effects.   In the whole of the image stack the trails in a very few of the subframes they are more rendered down through the averaging of the S-N ratios and overall data collected over the whole pile.  I think I'm saying that right...!!?  Anyhow while somewhat annoying in their "current" numbers the StarLink satellite trails can be dealt with any eliminated in your final post processed image at least with the things I do using Pixinsight.  Pretty sure any other dedicated astronomical image processing software out there likely are as capable of dealing with those little bastagis as well.... For now, as you know there are more to come.... lots more planned in the future!