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Low Earth Orbit Visualization

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Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#51

Post by maybewhenthesun »

NedF wrote: post #43
dhosek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proper scale makes the visualization impractical. I wrote about this with respect to a US map showing mountains on my mailing list: https://dahosek.substack.com/p/one-million-stories “any accurate depiction of elevation would be indistinguishable from a flat map at that scale. The coast-to-coast measure of the US is a bit under 3000 miles, while the highest elevation in the continental US is a bit under 4½ miles abov…

> Proper scale makes the visualization impractical. So lie? You can see from the comments most Hacker News users can't handle the abstraction. Your blog post is great, but most people don't know the Earth is a perfect sphere or simple things like the sun is white, the real "Don't Look Up" Universities have become pop culture, they are Gravity (2013), not 'science', whatever that word means now. We cross mountains so…

> So lie? Any 'visualisation' is a 'lie'.

If you look at google maps you'd think the distance between New York and Los Angeles is about 3 inch (depending on your zoom factor).

If you manage to grasp that abstraction, you might think the roads are about 5 miles wide.

etc etc.

where to draw the line.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#52

Post by XzAeRosho »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #45
elliottkember wrote: post #8

Objects not to scale. Not even close, and no mention of it (that I saw). Graphing scale honestly is extremely important. A lot of people are convinced our sky is full of satellites because of visualizations like this.

Do you think that some people look at this visualisation and leave with the impression that there are city sized satellites flying above them?

Absolutely. Common sense and critical thinking is less common than you may think.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#53

Post by lukan »

didgetmaster wrote: post #39
elliottkember wrote: post #8

Objects not to scale. Not even close, and no mention of it (that I saw). Graphing scale honestly is extremely important. A lot of people are convinced our sky is full of satellites because of visualizations like this.

Scale distortion is very practical when differences are either miniscule or astronomical. A poster of our solar system where the sun and planets are at scale would look like a black piece of paper with a tiny white dot in the center.

"A poster of our solar system where the sun and planets are at scale would look like a black piece of paper with a tiny white dot in the center."

Yes. And therefore a very valuable visualisation of reality.

Visualisations at scale are nice and useful, too, but they are misleading if the actual sizes are never shown to the target audience.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#54

Post by alias_neo »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #45
elliottkember wrote: post #8

Objects not to scale. Not even close, and no mention of it (that I saw). Graphing scale honestly is extremely important. A lot of people are convinced our sky is full of satellites because of visualizations like this.

Do you think that some people look at this visualisation and leave with the impression that there are city sized satellites flying above them?

> that there are city sized satellites flying above them

I don't think this is so much the issue, as much as that I didn't think about it.

I opened it and my first thought was wow, it's packed up there. Didn't consider the size of the things it's displaying relative to things on the surface.

There is certainly some merit in ensuring that first impression is accurate.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#55

Post by Moru »

esjeon wrote: post #41
orbital-decay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some kind of a relative velocity at the closest approach or a collision probability overlay would be way more useful to have than proper scale. That would make it immediately clear that lazy well-kept orbits like GEO are much safer than e.g. 567km SSO at the poles. Or some color coding for the apparent magnitude.

While I totally agree with the logic, this particular visualization might mislead unsuspecting viewers into believing that our LEO is almost fully saturated. In reality, the satellites are so small that they would miss each other even if placed on the same orbit.

A true-to-scale visualization would however be entirely misleading for everyone since it would be completely empty. Just look up in the sky at a clear sky. You would hardly see a single satelite and a visualization on a computer screen would show even less due to pixel size.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#56

Post by neitsa »

laxisOp wrote: post #30

How accurate is this . And where is our space station

In the search box, input "ISS" and filter by perigee (min: 380; max: 500). You should see the name of one of the modules of the ISS, such as "ISS (Zarya)" [0] or "ISS (Nauka)" [1]. If you can't find it on the visualisation at first, you can get its current location at https://isstracker.pl/en .

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarya_(ISS_module) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauka_(ISS_module)

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#57

Post by dguest »

laxisOp wrote: post #30

How accurate is this . And where is our space station

We have a few [0]. Some others have pointed out ISS, but there's also Tiangong which you can filter for [1] by looking for 48274 (the NORAD ID).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_stations#Operati...

[1]: https://platform.leolabs.space/visualizations/leo#search=482...

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#58

Post by the_other »

XzAeRosho wrote: post #52
sebzim4500 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that some people look at this visualisation and leave with the impression that there are city sized satellites flying above them?

Absolutely. Common sense and critical thinking is less common than you may think.

That's in part because "common sense" is an illusion and fantasy.

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#59

Post by dguest »

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #14

If anyone is curious, as I was, about the large red shapes on the map, those are the beams of the object tracking/measurement sites. They correlate with the maps at [0]. I was actually pretty blown away when I started reading that page. Apparently those stations can measure [0] https://leolabs.space/radars/

There are "beams" and "instruments". Does anyone know what the distinction is?

Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization

#60

Post by MarcelOlsz »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #45
elliottkember wrote: post #8

Objects not to scale. Not even close, and no mention of it (that I saw). Graphing scale honestly is extremely important. A lot of people are convinced our sky is full of satellites because of visualizations like this.

Do you think that some people look at this visualisation and leave with the impression that there are city sized satellites flying above them?

Yeah but I caught myself 3 seconds later.
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