Astronomers Outsmart Starlink to Protect Hubble Observations

Astronomers have developed a new tool to identify and remove satellite trails in Hubble images using a mathematical "trick" called Radon Transform. The tool identifies where the bad pixels are and the extent to which they affect the image and then calls them out. The software tool sums up all the light along every possible straight path across a given HST image, making it "pop out" in the transformed image. This approach works even for those that are very faint in the original image. Ground-based telescopes will also need to work out similar mathematical workarounds to fix images after the fact.