Improved Identification of Satellite Trails in ACS/WFC Imaging Using a Modified Radon Transform

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modified Radon Transform method for detecting faint satellite trails in ACS/WFC images, achieving high recovery rates and low false positives, and analyzes the increase in satellite trail contamination over two decades.

Contribution

A novel Radon Transform-based algorithm for identifying faint satellite trails in astronomical images, resistant to bright sources and capable of analyzing large datasets.

Findings

85% trail recovery rate compared to visual identification

2.5% false detection rate after filtering diffraction spikes

Satellite trail contamination has doubled over the last two decades

Abstract

We present a new approach to identify satellite trails (or other linear artifacts) in ACS/WFC imaging data using a modified Radon Transform. We demonstrate that this approach is sensitive to features with mean brightness significantly below the background noise level, and it is resistant to the influence of bright astronomical sources (e.g., stars, galaxies) in most cases. Comparing with a set of satellite trails identified by eye, we find a trail recovery rate of 85\% and a false detection rate (after removing diffraction spikes that are easily filtered) of 2.5\%. By performing an analysis using a much larger ACS/WFC data set where false trails are identified by their persistence across multiple images of the same field, we identify the Radon Transform parameter space and image properties where our algorithm is unreliable, and estimate a false detection rate of $\sim10\%$ elsewhere. We apply our method to ACS/WFC data taken between 2002 and 2022 to determine both the frequency of satellite trail contamination in science data and also the typical trail brightness as a function of time. We find the rate of satellite trail contamination has increased by approximately a factor of two in the last two decades, but there is no clear systematic evolution in the typical trail brightness. Our satellite trail identification program is available as part of the \texttt{acstools} package.