AstroDART: Astronomical Data Analysis and Recovery from Tracklets

Abstract

AstroDART is a Python package that implements a pipeline for processing, analyzing, and managing files derived from observations performed by ground-based optical telescopes. The main goal is to develop a software capable of retrieving information about satellites’ tracklets. In between its functionalities the following are included: perform astrometric reduction using Astrometry.net, detect tracklets using contour tracing techniques with ASTRiDE Python Package, refine the detected tracklets and perform telescope calibration by comparing the observations of known objects with catalogue data and obtaining the celestial coordinates of the object at the observation epoch. In addition, it produces the light curve and TDM files derived from the observations. The computation times are in the order of 15 s per image when no astrometric reduction is performed, increased to 50 s when the astrometric reduction and light curve analysis are included. The average residuals for both right ascension and declination are found to be lower than 9 arcsecs for all of the three test campaigns.