New software reduces satellite photobombs in Hubble images.
Researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute have developed new software, called Radon Transform, that is at least 10 times more effective than existing algorithms at detecting satellite trails in Hubble Space Telescope images. The software is sensitive to trails with average brightness as low as 0.1 times the background noise and identifies roughly twice as many trails as other studies. The team found that satellite trail contamination has increased by approximately a factor of two in the last two decades, although there was no evidence of a corresponding change in trail brightness.