Large Satellite Constellations
&
their Impact on Astronomy

Olivier R .Hainaut

Simulation of the effect on observations

This web-tool generates maps of the sky above an observatory, showing the number of satellite trails detected with an instrument. The method is described in our paper Bassa, Hainaut and Galadi (2021) PDF. The code is available on GitHub:ohainaut/SatConAnalytic.

You can set the parameters of the telescope and instrument, and adjust the position of the sun, then generate the plot (it takes a couple of seconds). Please call this page only for casual exploration. If you want to generate many plots, please contact us.

Simulation

Select what you want to compute:

Generic satellite density (sat/sq.deg)
Generic trail density (sat/deg/s)
Contribution to the sky brightness
Number of sat. trail in an observation (this is most likely what you want)

Telescope

Select a telescope/instrument

Define your telescope
- Latitude=deg
- Field of View=deg
- Resolution (or pixel size)=arcsec
- Exposure time=s
- Limiting magnitude (5sigma in exp.time)=mag
or select from the list:

Observation conditions

Set the position of the Sun. If the requested position is impossible, the system will chose something.

Sun declination:-23 (southern solstice)0 (equinox)+23 (northern solstice)
Elevation of the Sun=deg. (>0: day; <-18: night)

Constellation

Pick one of the constellation sets:

2018, before Starlink started, around 2700sat
2021, with around 1500 Starlink and 150 OneWeb, total 4200sat
All Starlink Gen.1 and 2 satellites, 42000sat
All OneWeb (revised 2021), 6300sat
2030, all SL, OW, GuoWang, Kuiper (64000sat)
2050, SL, OW, GuoWang, Kuiper, ESp (400 000sat)

Large Satellite Constellations & their Impact on Astronomy