Low Earth Orbit Visualization • Hacker News Board

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#41

Post by geenew » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 5:39 PM UTC

This made me look up a link to my old favourite for this kind of thing, CelesTrak.org . Unfortunately, they discontinued their visualizer due to licensing problems.

For posterity, this was the tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC90GyHMabk

The announcement is here: https://twitter.com/CelesTrak/status/1547264390650527744

For now, the person behind it's got a (informative) error message showing up: https://celestrak.com/cesium/orbit-viz.php

He's asking for donations, might be worth it. It was a good tool.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#42

Post by tullianus » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

sizzzzlerz wrote: post #35

nerdponx wrote: post #2

I don't really know what I'm looking at here, but it feels very sci-fi and I'm into it. I also wonder, how do they track so many objects? Who actually tracks them? How much does it cost (energy, engineers) to maintain the tracking systems? Edit: Are these all simulated orbits? Is there a big "orbit registry" somewhere? And what are the "beams"?

The US Air Force, for one, is responsible for tracking everything it sees. That generally means computing TLAs for each object. Whether they release this info, I don't know.

That capability was transferred to the Space Force recently. They make their data publicly available here: https://www.space-track.org/

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#43

Post by outworlder » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

itslennysfault wrote: post #16

baron816 wrote: post #10

These kinds of visualizations give you the impression that LEO is much more crowded than it actually is.

I feel like the "objects" aren't anywhere near being to scale. Pretty sure they should be MUCH MUCH smaller relative to the earth to be realistic.

If they were, we wouldn't be able to see it in visualizations.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#44

Post by dang » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

daveslash wrote: post #14

Previous Comment Threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24773462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309367

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

LeoLabs: Low Earth Orbit Visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31413373 - May 2022 (3 comments)

LeoLabs: low earth orbit visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180865 - April 2022 (1 comment)

Low Earth Orbit Visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26309367 - March 2021 (93 comments)

Monitoring a high risk conjunction between two large defunct objects in LEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24773462 - Oct 2020 (150 comments)

Low Earth Orbit Visualization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22165645 - Jan 2020 (1 comment)

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#45

Post by outworlder » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

FpUser wrote: post #25

This is really nice made and shows how crowded the LEO space is

Or _not_ crowded.

We have more boats and planes than there are orbital objects. If you open flightradar you'll see an absolute abomination of planes flying overhead. Yet, unless you live close to an airport, you probably won't see any. The planet is really large. Space is larger still.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#46

Post by lastofthemojito » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

itslennysfault wrote: post #16

baron816 wrote: post #10

These kinds of visualizations give you the impression that LEO is much more crowded than it actually is.

I feel like the "objects" aren't anywhere near being to scale. Pretty sure they should be MUCH MUCH smaller relative to the earth to be realistic.

I mean, you need to actually be able to see the objects for it to be a visualization though. If the satellites were drawn to scale they'd be smaller than a pixel.

I think you can get a decent sense of how crowded (or not) an area is by watching how many objects pass though it. The state that I live in looks like it has somewhere between 1 and 10 satellites above it at any given time, which drives home the point that LEO isn't quite as "busy" as it feels from a zoomed-out, sped-up view of the map.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#47

Post by pb7 » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

iwillbenice wrote: post #30

rickreynoldssf wrote: post #7

That crashed my browser HARD. Needed a full reboot. Thanks for that!

Yeah, there's a lot of objects being rendered on screen. My GPU (3090 Ti) was running at about 41% while I was playing with the site. Amazing site, but definitely GPU intensive.

This Safari tab is at 65% GPU utilization on M1 MBP. Can't quite tell what frame rate but appears visually silky smooth so guessing 60+.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#48

Post by rajeshp1986 » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

How is this built? Is this built on d3.js? This reminded me of old flash style plugins which we don't see any more.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#49

Post by Kucher » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

modeless wrote: post #31

ubj wrote: post #28

Those long, straight-line convoys of Starlink satellites are fascinating. There's a few of them I could see scattered around the Earth. At what point do they start breaking up into unrelated orbits? Looking forward to using this website to try spotting satellites at night. There's something strangely thrilling about seeing objects in the night sky that were placed there by people.

For spotting satellites at night, try my site: https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ Most of the satellites shown on the Leolabs site are too dim to see without a telescope because they don't reflect enough light. My site calculates brightness and filters down to the ones that you can see with the unaided eye. There are still quite a few! ISS in particular is very bright and can even be seen before sunset. The new…

I have used your site to successfully spot Starlink trains and the ISS several times. It's very well-designed and the included street view overlay especially helps with knowing where in the sky to look.

Thank you!

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#50

Post by russellbeattie » Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

Imagine if this was to scale and each of the satellites was a giant floating city the size of Tokyo or LA? I wonder how many centuries will pass before that becomes a reality.

It's sort of interesting that there's been a wonky steam punk movie about battling cities roaming the Earth, gobbling each other up, but none about the more plausible future where there are battles between giant orbiting cities who pass their hated rivals once every certain number of years.