Related papers: Brightness Characterization for Starlink Direct-to…

Brightness statistics for satellites of the Starlink, BlueBird, Qianfan, Guowang and OneWeb constellations are reported. The means and standard deviations are compared to acceptable limits set by the International Astronomical Union's…

The Steward Observatory LEO Satellite Photometric Survey is a comprehensive observational survey to characterize the apparent brightness of the Starlink and OneWeb low Earth orbit satellites and evaluate the potential impact on astronomy.…

It has been pointed out that the Galactic satellites all have a common mass around 1e7 Msun within 300 pc (M03), while they span almost four order of magnitudes in luminosity (Mateo et al. 1993, Strigari et al. 2008). It is argued that this…

The development of low earth orbit (LEO) mega-constellation fundamentally threatens ground-based optical astronomical observations. To study the photometric properties of the LEO mega-constellations, we used the Xinglong 50 cm telescope to…

Observations have been carried out in order to assess the optical characteristics of the BlueWalker 3 spacecraft which is the prototype for a new satellite constellation. The illumination phase function has been determined and evaluated.…

Observed magnitudes of Qianfan spacecraft range from 4 when they are near zenith to 8 when low in the sky. Nearly all of the observations can be modeled with a nadir-facing flat antenna panel and the underside of a zenith-facing solar…

Four observations of Starlink's LEO communication satellites, Darksat and STARLINK-1113, were conducted on two nights with two telescopes. The Chakana 0.6\,m telescope at the Ckoirama observatory (Chile) observed both satellites on…

The diffuse stellar component of galaxy clusters known as intracluster light (ICL) has been proposed as an observable tracer of the cluster's dark matter (DM) halo. Assessing its reliability as a DM tracer requires understanding how the…

The effect of satellite constellations on observations in the visible and IR domains is estimated, considering 18 constellations in development by SpaceX, Amazon, OneWeb, and others, with over 26,000 satellites, constituting a…

The number of satellites on low orbit has dramatically increased over the past years, raising concerns among the astronomical community about their impact on observations. Spectroscopic observations represent a large fraction of…

The properties of multiple image gravitational lenses require a fractional surface mass density in satellites of f=0.02 (0.006 < f < 0.07 at 90% confidence) that is consistent with the expectations for CDM. The characteristic satellite mass…

We quantify the detectability of stellar Milky Way satellites in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 5. We show that the effective search volumes for the recently discovered SDSS--satellites depend strongly on their luminosity,…

This paper presents time series observations and analysis of broadband night sky airglow intensity 4 September 2018 through 30 April 2020. Data were obtained at 5 sites spanning more than 8500 km during the historically deep minimum of…

We conduct a comprehensive and statistical study of the luminosity functions (LFs) for satellite galaxies, by counting photometric galaxies from HSC, DECaLS and SDSS around isolated central galaxies (ICGs) and paired galaxies from the…

There is a growing concern about an impact of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite constellations on ground-based astronomical observations, in particular, on wide-field surveys in the optical and infrared. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF),…

A most desirable feature of a standard candle to estimate astronomical distances is robustness against changes in metallicity and age. It is argued that the radii of main sequence stars with spectral types from solar to A0 show predictable…

InfraRed Dark Clouds (IRDCs) are extinction features against the Galactic infrared background, mainly in mid-infrared band. Recently they were proposed to be potential sites of massive star formation. In this work we have made 12CO, 13CO,…

Starlink satellites can become extremely bright when sunlight reflects specularly to an observer on the ground. The observed brightness of such flares is consistent with a bidirectional reflectance function of the Starlink satellite…

We compare spherically-averaged radial number counts of bright (> 10^5 Lsun) dwarf satellite galaxies within 400 kpc of the Milky Way (MW) and M31 and find that the MW satellites are much more centrally concentrated. Remarkably, the two…

We use a volume-limited spectroscopic sample of isolated galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to investigate the frequency and radial distribution of luminous (M_r <~ -18.3) satellites like the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) around…