I guess this is US only? The site is horribly broken upon loading. Only after using developer tools I discovered that all scripts and assets return 403 - CloudFront configured to block your country. Edit: I'm in Hong Kong.
Worked for me in the UK.
Low Earth Orbit Visualization
71–80 of 195 posts
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you have a high refresh rate monitor? I only hit ~35% GPU usage with 1660ti but my browser is synced to 60 FPS.
It is 100Hz refresh rate - so 100fps I imagine.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#73We need "Space Roombas"™ Starlink was first but what happens when a dozen companies eventually want to put up their own 10,000 low-orbit satellites?
Until your space roomba hits space debris going the opposite direction and becomes even more space debris
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#74Those 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…
Your website is very well designed, thanks
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#75Those 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.
They don't break up in to unrelated orbits. They simply spread out along the same orbit by varying the period for a few weeks.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#76If 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.
Those news stories would be a lot less interesting with a black picture of space with a footnote that the satellites are there, just too small to see.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but there's only a handful of these. Huge if true.
Oh, there are plenty of US satellites with classified payloads/missions; I just mean that most classified US satellites DO have orbital elements listed in the Space Force catalog.
Often not in the public catalog though.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#78Enable Debris and be shocked.
Try ground view with debris on.
It looks like Asteroids after you've shot them into 10,000 micro asteroids.
Just needs a UFO going pew-pew...
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#79This is truly fascinating.
Re: Low Earth Orbit Visualization
#80If 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.
With orbital junk visualizations, relative size isn't that important. What matters is collision probability. Low polar sun-synchronous orbits where the remote sensing stuff typically lives are super crowded, especially at the poles; in contrast, GSO is a well kept orbit with low relative velocities, and the dead stuff drifts away, so it's really safe.