Identifying and Measuring Satellite Streaks in DECam Images
Abstract
The rapid growth of satellite constellations, particularly Starlink, is increasingly affecting ground-based astronomy. In this project, we developed a workflow to detect, identify, and measure the brightness of trails from artificial satellites and other orbiting objects in archival images from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), available through the NOIRLab Data Archive. We filtered images with visible streaks, retrieved detector-level images, applied the Hough Transform (via satmetrics) to detect and align trails, and performed surface brightness photometry. We also used SatChecker to obtain likely identifications for each trail. Our sample of nine measured streaks includes Starlink satellites, a navigation satellite, a decommissioned science satellite, and a rocket body. Our results show that satellites and other orbiting objects are consistently detectable in DECam images, but their brightness varies significantly, reflecting design and operational differences across object types and models. While the methodology proved effective, detecting faint streaks was challenging, and short-lived glints remain an even harder problem for future work. This proof-of-concept establishes a foundation for larger statistical studies of satellite impacts on astronomical surveys. The code is available at https://github.com/iausathub/reca-streaks
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.10790,
title = {Identifying and Measuring Satellite Streaks in DECam Images},
author = {Alexandra Serrano Mendoza and Meredith L. Rawls and Andrés Alejandro Plazas Malagón},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.10790},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Published in Revista eSpectra (Observatorio Astron\'omico Nacional de Colombia; https://drive.google.com/file/d/197nayTaqmTiJN0onE_tskd_5oKVXJGbA/view). Research conducted as part of the RECA Internship Program 2025 (https://www.astroreca.org/en/2025)