Hi all, Slightly off-topic perhaps, but of interest to some of us. For those who want to visualize satellite orbits and constellations of satellite orbits in 2D and 3D, I have a cool software recommendation. JSatTrak by Shawn Gano exists for six years now, but seems to be relatively unknown in our community (I myself only discovered it last year), so I thought I point it out to you all, simply because it is [Cartman voice] "Cewl!" [/Cartman voice]. It can be found here: http://www.gano.name/shawn/JSatTrak/ The best thing: JSatTrak is open source, so completely free. The software runs using JAVA, so you have to have JAVA installed. This means the software is platform independent and wil run on any OS with the proper JAVA environment installed. And frankly, it is the best and most versatile orbit visualization tool I know, short of STK. It definitely has an edge over Orbitron, software more of you will be familiar with. It has more options (e.g. the 3D option) and the graphics are superb. It is able to depict (in the 2D map) nighttime areas with city lights, for example. Apart from a 2D map, it is able to generate 3D images (a 3D globe with satellite orbit, footprint etcetera, as well as coordinate systems if you want that), and animate these. It is one of few examples of this kind of software that can depict multiple satellite orbits at the same time, both in the 2D and 3D visualizations. Moreover, it has other interesting extras. It is able to perform a coverage analysis for example, a feature I used last year to analyze the launch time of the N-Korean KMS 3-2 satellite in relation to US and Japanese LEO imagery satellite passes over the launch site. Turns out, they launched at the end of a one-hour coverage gap. Shawn Gano, who wrote the software, is responsive to suggestions (for example, he has just written a custom plugin for me, for a software feature I wished). The weak point of the software is that it runs in JAVA (it is also a strength, as that makes it platform independent). It means you have to have JAVA installed, which not everybody will like for safety and performance reasons. Current JAVA versions tend to be slow and resource hogs, and JAVA updates can affect the performance of the software. Early 2013, a JAVA update even completely broke the 4.1.4 version of the software, but Shawn has now rewritten the affected parts and the new 4.1.5 version runs again (although I have some difficulty getting the movie file generation to work). You'll find some images generated with the software in one of my recent blog posts, providing you an indication of the graphic quality (note however that I added some text in those images later using a graphics editor). JSatTrak does have a pass prediction option as well (but no sky track visualisation option). - Marco ----- Dr Marco Langbroek - SatTrackCam Leiden, the Netherlands. e-mail: sattrackcam@langbroek.org Cospar 4353 (Leiden): 52.15412 N, 4.49081 E (WGS84), +0 m ASL Cospar 4354 (De Wilck): 52.11685 N, 4.56016 E (WGS84), -2 m ASL Station (b)log: http://sattrackcam.blogspot.com Twitter: @Marco_Langbroek ----- _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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