Trailblazer
An open data repository for astronomical images affected by satellites
Check out Trailblazer at https://trailblazer.dirac.dev
Motivation
An increasing population of commercial low-Earth orbit satellites is beginning to significantly impact ground-based astronomical observations. For an overview of the situation and its impacts to astronomy and more, see Lawrence et al. 2022. To minimize some impacts, we aim to enable quantitative studies of streaks from satellites in images over time.
Therefore, Trailblazer is collecting and sharing recent (c. 2020–present) telescope images in the FITS file format known to be affected by satellite streaks. Trailblazer is presently in a prototype stage, and may not successfully upload images from every telescope yet. If you encounter an upload or query failure while using the site, please open a GitHub issue.
Credit
Trailblazer is hosted by the Institute for Data-intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology (DiRAC) at the University of Washington, and is a cornerstone of SatHub at the International Astronomical Union Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference (IAU CPS). It was conceived and initially developed by Meredith Rawls and Dino Bektešević.
If you make use of Trailblazer in your research, please cite this repository, e.g., in a footnote.