Tl;dr, From personal experience, it’s not worth it. It’s a lot easier to throw away bad data then to try to calculate when stop. There’s not a lot of ambiguity as to whether it messes up the data.

As of right now, it’s not that big of a problem either. Sure some are particularly unlucky, as seen with a Magellanic cloud observation in early 2020. The concern is more the future; 12,000+ satellites (that are unusually bright compared to similar satellites) could cause problems on the future, for not only observational astronomers, but for the amateur observer’s night sky; just like telephone lines would ruin natural views, the fear is that too many satellites would do the same to our night skies.

There are other concerns as well, but what it boils down to is a lack of way to deal with it. Right now, the occasional satellite coming into view messes up a frame or two of data, you consider it an unlucky break, and you move on with one less data point. There may be some state of the art observatories that consider whether a satellite will cross their observational area at night, but I have never worked at one that does. And that’s because it just isn’t worth it for how frequent a problem it is. Space is big; sometimes the area you’re looking at is really small, and between those two you’re normally ok for the most part.

To my knowledge, no (commonly used at least) archive possesses a collection of all satellites from all the different entities (government, businesses) and where they’ll be. Sure this information is accessible, but there’s quite a few entities on the earth that have satellites in the sky; to have all of their info in the same place is a major undertaking. Now there may be some versions of this for those looking to put new satellites in space, regarding orbits etc, but there is not a tool that I’m aware of that has relevant tools for observational astronomers.

And right now we don’t need that. And honestly it’s a lot easier to toss out bad data then to try to weave intermediate stops into your tracking program for your telescope. But maybe some day we’ll have to plan observations so that we don’t waste too much valuable telescope time on bad data. Time will tell.

Tl;dr, From personal experience, it’s not worth it. It’s a lot easier to throw away bad data than to try to calculate when stop. There’s not a lot of ambiguity as to whether it messes up the data.

As of right now, it’s not that big a problem either. Sure, some are particularly unlucky, as seen with a Magellanic cloud observation in early 2020. The concern is more the future: 12,000+ satellites (that are unusually bright compared to similar satellites) could cause problems in the future, for not only observational astronomers, but for the amateur observer’s night sky; just like telephone lines would ruin natural views, the fear is that too many satellites would do the same to our night skies.

There are other concerns as well, but what it boils down to is a lack of a way to deal with it. Right now, the occasional satellite coming into view messes up a frame or two of data, you consider it an unlucky break, and you move on with one less data point. There may be some state of the art observatories that consider whether a satellite will cross their observational area at night, but I have never worked at one that does. And that’s because it just isn’t worth it for how frequent a problem it is. Space is big; sometimes the area you’re looking at is really small, and between those two you’re normally OK for the most part.

To my knowledge, no (commonly used at least) archive possesses a collection of all satellites from all the different entities (government, businesses) and where they’ll be. Sure this information is accessible, but there’s quite a few entities on the Earth that have satellites in the sky; to have all of their info in the same place is a major undertaking. Now there may be some versions of this for those looking to put new satellites in space, regarding orbits etc, but there is not a tool that I’m aware of that has relevant tools for observational astronomers.

And right now we don’t need that. And honestly it’s a lot easier to toss out bad data than to try to weave intermediate stops into your tracking program for your telescope. But maybe some day we’ll have to plan observations so that we don’t waste too much valuable telescope time on bad data. Time will tell.