Satellite trail removal doesn't work

[soundfan]

Hi Robin,

as I'm going further to using more and more of SC's features I wanted to try out the "remove satellite trails" function. Mostly I'm doing EAA and despite the amazing results I've seen so far, the satellite trails are kind of annoying.

Of cause I read the SC help, searched the forum and tried to follow the instructions to the letter.

I have plenty of pictures (raw) with satellite trails, the stack looked like a spider web.
In SC I opened test camera 1 (also tried folder monitor camera), loaded a raw image (with trails) in "testing controls", turned on Test (Highlight Trails), set sensitivity to min and max, minimum length to 50 and 500, Trail width to 1 and 10. None of the settings had any effect.

I use the latest version of SC, Computer is either I5 with WIN10, 16GB RAM, 1TB HDD or Laptop with I9, WIN 11, 32GB RAM, RTX4070, 2TB SSD. So it should not be a performance issue.

I have the strange feeling that I need to set a hook somewhere to make that feature work and I'm just too blind to see...

Many thanks for your help in advance!

CS Mike

[carlomuccini]

To be honest, it never worked for me either.

Carlo

[admin]

Hi Mike,

can you share the FITS image you used with me please - from the screenshot it's hard to be sure of the cause, since I don't know the amount of stretch being used to make the trail visible or the full resolution. If I can get it to work I will let you know how, otherwise it might help me improve the feature!

cheers,

Robin

[soundfan]

Hi Robin,

thanks for taking care of this and sorry for my late reply.

I have uploaded five FITS of this stack with satellite trails of all intensities to my Google drive:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

It would be great if you could have a look and see if there is something to improve.

Many thanks again!

CS
Mike

[admin]

Hi Mike,

thanks for sharing - I get partial success by setting the width to minimum and the sensitivity to maximum. It gets a bit better if you also turn on 'background subtract' - to 'Blended Offset', but even with less background to confuse matters it isn't 100%. I will see if I can work anything out to improve the situation.

cheers,

Robin

[soundfan]

Thank you for the update and effort! Much appreciated.

CS Mike

[admin]

Hi Mike,

just an update - I have some potential changes that will really help for these images. However, those changes cause a different problem to recur (this is the problem that early versions of the satellite trail removal tended to 'eat' globular clusters - spotting the tightly packed stars as a group of crossing lines). I need to work out a new approach to making sure things like globs don't falsely trigger the satellite removal before I can put these changes into a new SharpCap update.

cheers,

Robin

[soundfan]

That sound very promising, Robin.

Thanks again for your effort. Can't wait to test it once you release a first version.

If I can support by trying on my picture material, I'd be happy to give you feedback.

I can't stress enough how extraordinary your support always is. Can't think of any other software that is supported that way!

CS Mike

[admin]

Hi Mike,

hopefully will get an update out today with the new changes - I got the problem with globular clusters pretty much sorted over the weekend. I'd love to have some sort of 'automatic' sensitivity to make it easier to user, and I think it might be possible, but I'm not going to hold up a useful improvements in the hope of making an even better one.

cheers,

Robin

[soundfan]

Hi Robin,

I have downloaded the new version immediately and tried with the frames which I sent you.

Only result I got after minutes of calculations (no idea what took so long) is this:

Screenshot 2024-07-22 201939.jpg (678.66 KiB) Viewed 1539 times

I think this is not exactly how it should look like, right?

Do I have to change any settings?

CS Mike