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Low Earth Orbit Visualization

platform.leolabs.space

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Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#111

Post by prazgaitis »

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…

This site is really cool, and I love your blog post explaining how it works. Hats off, fantastic work!

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#112

Post by aerostable_slug »

outworlder wrote: post #45
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.

Not sure why this is downvoted. Space is really, really big (the name fits!). The biggest Earth-orbiting satellites are a bit less than the size of a school bus (the biggest being something like KH-9 size) in terms of mass, somewhat bigger when it comes to things like parabolic dishes.

We worry about orbital debris because of the consequence of loss. There's a lot of room up there (not discounting everyone's concern).

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#113

Post by georgeg23 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #107
kaboomerizer wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> https://youtu.be/fEkXTV69yo4?t=22s Holy S$#! I didn't know about that. Are there links between this Space Force project and Starlink?

It just shows what an orbiting satellite constellation looks like and why so many are required. That is the similarity

Actually SpaceX IS working on what that video shows:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#115

Post by mncharity »

mlindner wrote: post #69
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.

> At what point do they start breaking up into unrelated orbits? It's not as easy to see as in this visualization, but Jonathan McDowell ( https://twitter.com/planet4589 ) posts graphs on his website of each launch of starlink satellites as they raise orbits. https://planet4589.org/space/stats/star/starstats.html Scroll down to the individual launches and there's images you can click on of the orbit raising progress…

And the adjacent graphs show phase (line growing longer, spreading along an orbit), and plane (line breaking into multiple lines slotting into nearby orbits). Positioning is accomplished by spending time at different-than-deployed altitudes, mostly lower. Lower gives a difference in nodal precession (Earth being non-spherical), IIRC something vaguely like half a degree/day difference out of several deg/day, slowly changing plane westward. Thus plane changes take weeks of drifting. Launch being far more about "go fast (in some direction)" than "while being high", rapid plane change (direction change) would have prohibitive "launch-like" energy cost. So a single launch will populate one or few nearby planes. And finally lower orbits orbit faster, quickly overtaking deployed sats in a single plane to reach deployment positions. Kerbal Space Program is thought a fun way to play with such.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#117

Post by ortusdux »

jcwayne wrote: post #59
jcims wrote: post #22

If the earth is 750 pixels wide in the default zoom, each pixel is 10mi/16km. Scale image of the ISS would be roughly 1/150th of a pixel.

Thank you for this. While the visualization is useful/interesting, it frustrates me how often similar visuals are used in news stories about space junk. Yes, it's a problem, but using visuals like this without proper explanation misrepresents it terribly.

I would love to see a visualization comparing orbital traffic/debris with marine traffic.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#118

Post by jgtrosh »

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 can't tell if the times are for my timezone?

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#120

Post by modeless »

jgtrosh wrote: post #118
modeless wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can't tell if the times are for my timezone?

Times are displayed in the time zone your device's clock is set to. Unless you use the "Change Location" feature, in which case local time zone of the selected location will be used, with explicit time zone abbreviations shown.
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