Question about satellites in Astronomy

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TommyJ
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Question about satellites in Astronomy

Post by TommyJ » Fri Dec 11, 2020 11:25 am

Hello!
I am interested in a few things about satellites and their role in astronomy.
How do satellites affect professional astronomy? And how does it affect the amateur? (heard that many consider them a hindrance)
As far as I follow the news in this industry - now their number will continue to increase. Due to the great popularity of space in our time and the emergence of more and more enthusiasts who want to launch rockets and satellites in private

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Chris Peterson
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Re: Question about satellites in Astronomy

Post by Chris Peterson » Fri Dec 11, 2020 2:25 pm

TommyJ wrote: Fri Dec 11, 2020 11:25 am Hello!
I am interested in a few things about satellites and their role in astronomy.
How do satellites affect professional astronomy? And how does it affect the amateur? (heard that many consider them a hindrance)
As far as I follow the news in this industry - now their number will continue to increase. Due to the great popularity of space in our time and the emergence of more and more enthusiasts who want to launch rockets and satellites in private
My observation is that for casual visual astronomy, they enhance public interest. They encourage more people to look at the sky.

For serious visual amateur astronomers, they don't have much impact.

For most amateur and most professional imagers, they don't have much impact.

For large field survey telescopes they can be problematic. In instruments with wide fields and fast optics, some of the satellites are bright enough to cause blooming of the CCD sensors, which can ruin most of all of an image. There is also the less severe problem of dealing with transient artifacts in images that are intended in many cases to detect naturally transient events.

They are potentially problematic for radio astronomy, as they use radio bands for their communications that sometimes overlap bands of scientific interest.
Chris

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neufer
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Re: Question about satellites in Astronomy

Post by neufer » Fri Dec 11, 2020 2:44 pm

TommyJ wrote: Fri Dec 11, 2020 11:25 am
I am interested in a few things about satellites and their role in astronomy.

How do satellites affect professional astronomy?

The primary advantage of satellite telescopes is to get above:

  • atmospheric absorption :arrow:

    and turbulence (i.e., star twinkle) distortion.
Art Neuendorffer

KayBur
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Re: Question about satellites in Astronomy

Post by KayBur » Thu Dec 17, 2020 5:14 pm

TommyJ wrote: Fri Dec 11, 2020 11:25 am Hello!
I am interested in a few things about satellites and their role in astronomy.
How do satellites affect professional astronomy? And how does it affect the amateur? (heard that many consider them a hindrance)
As far as I follow the news in this industry - now their number will continue to increase. Due to the great popularity of space in our time and the emergence of more and more enthusiasts who want to launch rockets and satellites in private
Satellites allow you to explore space in any weather. As you can imagine, if the sky is overcast, then a ground-based telescope will see little. But the telescope installed on the satellite allows you to work and conduct research around the clock. After all, the universe is a huge thing, there are enough objects for everyone to study. More and more aerospace companies appear these days. Just the other day I found this one https://dragonfly GO AWAY aerospace.com/ and became interested. Of course, now this company is little known around the world, but who knows how the situation will change in 5 years? It seems to me that putting satellites into low-Earth orbit is the key to studying the laws of the universe and also a way to study a whole range of processes that occur on the surface of the Earth!

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geckzilla
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Re: Question about satellites in Astronomy

Post by geckzilla » Thu Dec 17, 2020 6:14 pm

yeah, I bet you are genuinely interested and not just here to put sneaky advertising/spam links in the forum to increase the search engine rankings for the company that hired you
Just call me "geck" because "zilla" is like a last name.

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