61–70 of 195 posts
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.
Neat. I wonder if this is solely generated from their array of distrbuted sensors, or if this is just another visualization tool using space-track.org's data.
Im on my phone but you could probably look in the network requests panel of your browsers developer tools to see if any request is sent to space-track.org. Side note: does anyone know of a good tool / app for looking at things like that on iOS ?
How do you launch a satellite without risking running into one of these things on the way up? Do you have to calculate the trajectories of all of them individually?
Also this visualization is kind of misleading as it makes the satellites look way too big. In reality you could not even see them from even from the closest zoom available.
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…
How do you launch a satellite without risking running into one of these things on the way up? Do you have to calculate the trajectories of all of them individually?
Enable Debris and be shocked.
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.
Think about it: they say 19334 objects are tracked. Imagine that many cars or trucks in the world scattered all across. Then extrude that to couple hundreds of kilometers. Would that feel congested to you? 19334 new cars are being manufactured in less than 2,5 hours...
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.
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 of each launch.
Example of the Starlink 4-21 mission that launched on July 7th of this year: https://planet4589.org/space/stats/star/spl51.jpg (One satellite failed, which isn't that unusual, and will de-orbit probably sometime early next year if they don't recover it.)
Edit: I'm in Hong Kong.
