Not too long ago I gave up trying to get the Starry Night planetarium program to work on my home computer. Now even though, with the help of the computer guy at school, I finally got it to work there, I decided that the lack of controls in the preferences made the only version I thought we could afford to get multiple licenses for, not worth having. I simply wanted to show orbital planes but the "realistic" satellites were so small that they were barely visible. Then I investigated Celestia, a free program. I found that Grant Hutchison made a spread sheet that would allow a single TLE to be input into the program. One TLE was not enough and I didn't want to add them one at a time. So, after many hours of work I finally succeeded in making it possible to convert 20 TLEs at a time to a format that can be used with Celestia. For a test run I uploaded 13 Iridium satellites that are all in one orbital plane. I made each 50 km across so that they would be easily visible when orbiting the Earth as seen from space. I sped up the time considerably as well. I'm amazed at how spectacular Celestia is at showing the nature of satellite orbits. It's a beautiful program and it's absolutely free! A great option for a school where teachers were told not to spend any more $ than we have to this year. These Molniya satellites are really neat when seen flying together! MOLNIYA 3-51 1 26867U 01030A 06301.32076550 -.00000050 00000-0 -40245-3 0 9402 2 26867 64.1340 329.7943 7408077 276.4258 149.8586 2.00661717 38634 MOLNIYA 1-92 1 27707U 03011A 06301.85358639 .00000402 00000-0 -68679-3 0 3366 2 27707 64.7716 329.2918 7401174 280.6712 159.0330 2.00636842 26190 MOLNIYA 3-53 1 27834U 03029A 06301.66828233 -.00000029 00000-0 -24279-3 0 2090 2 27834 64.7686 329.2815 7405857 281.2835 40.5620 2.00635274 24617 Does anyone know of any Molniya satellites that fly over an area one after the other that I could show my students the orbits of? Isn't that the way they work? Thanks in advance! Tom Iowa USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Oct 29 2006 - 01:44:49 EDT