Low Earth Orbit Visualization

Those long, straight-line convoys of Starlink satellites are fascinating. There&#x27;s a few of them I could see scattered around the Earth. At what point do they start breaking up into unrelated orbits?<p>Looking forward to using this website to try spotting satellites at night. There&#x27;s something strangely thrilling about seeing objects in the night sky that were placed there by people.

If the earth is 750 pixels wide in the default zoom, each pixel is 10mi&#x2F;16km. Scale image of the ISS would be roughly 1&#x2F;150th of a pixel.

I don&#x27;t really know what I&#x27;m looking at here, but it feels very sci-fi and I&#x27;m into it.<p>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?<p>Edit: Are these all <i>simulated</i> orbits? Is there a big &quot;orbit registry&quot; somewhere? And what are the &quot;beams&quot;?

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.<p>For posterity, this was the tutorial: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wC90GyHMabk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wC90GyHMabk</a><p>The announcement is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;CelesTrak&#x2F;status&#x2F;1547264390650527744" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;CelesTrak&#x2F;status&#x2F;1547264390650527744</a><p>For now, the person behind it&#x27;s got a (informative) error message showing up: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;celestrak.com&#x2F;cesium&#x2F;orbit-viz.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;celestrak.com&#x2F;cesium&#x2F;orbit-viz.php</a><p>He&#x27;s asking for donations, might be worth it. It was a good tool.

Previous Comment Threads:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24773462" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24773462</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26309367" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26309367</a>

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

That&#x27;s really cool. I know this comment is low-effort, but I don&#x27;t really care - this type of real-time visualization is really interesting and I want to see more of this sort of thing going forward.<p>That said, the blue dots are &quot;unknown&quot; - what could those possibly be? Not trying to be conspiratorial or anything, but is it some sort of debris from classified operations or foreign intelligence operations?

I’ve played kerbal space program for over 500 hours and I can confirm LEO looks like this in my game.

Scott Manley, unsurprisingly, did a nice video showing what it&#x27;d look like if you could see all the satellites and debris in space from the surface of Earth. It&#x27;s scary how much stuff there is up there.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dJNGi-bt9NM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dJNGi-bt9NM</a>

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?

The fact that I can view LEO objects in real-time on a phone just shows how awesome technology has become.<p>Even 10 years ago, that thought would have been ludicrous.

This is fascinating. Can someone point me to resources that explain Starlink&#x27;s seemingly (but obviously not) random trajectories as well as their positions (some in a line, some on individual trajectories).

Imagine a visualization of all debris and litter that’s on the <i>ground</i>. Low Earth Orbit is very clean by comparison. This visualization makes it seem impassable and treacherous.

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.<p>It&#x27;s sort of interesting that there&#x27;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.

How is this built? Is this built on d3.js? This reminded me of old flash style plugins which we don&#x27;t see any more.

This looks extremely crowded - but reminds me of how apparently hard it was to find or bump into another ship crossing even a confined sea like the Med before sonar. With three dimensions here and more avoidance planning, even this level of space probably looks <i>very</i> empty still.

If you enter &quot;1&quot; for the visualization speed, is that the actual recorded velocities?

Enable Debris and be shocked.

I&#x27;m amazed how large satellites have become. They are larger than small countries, like Luxembourg, Cyprus, Trinidad, ... How do they get these huge satellites up in space? Unbelievable...

Can someone fill me in quickly on what are &quot;instruments&quot;?

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&#x27;s data.

Amazing that each piece of debris is ID&#x27;d and tracked.

I wonder how much light is blocked by this stuff floating around? Seems like there are parallel efforts to make atmospheric dust while this is already up there.

Does anyone know what the altitude scaling is on this?

We need &quot;Space Roombas&quot;™<p>Starlink was first but what happens when a dozen companies eventually want to put up their own 10,000 low-orbit satellites?

&quot;Oh my god it&#x27;s full of junk&quot;

I&#x27;m impress by the number of objects (well mainly starlink) passing over my head every minute

Pardon my ignorance, but how in the hell do we get other things into space with all of this in way?

Why does New Zealand have so many beams? All of Australia has zero for comparison.

This is truly fascinating.

Damn that&#x27;s impressive. Its hard to imagine being up that high

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

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

Are the speed realtime? It seems they are really fast.

The &quot;Unknown&quot; objects are literally UFOs

Is there a way to set the time to &#x27;now&#x27;?

What tech is powering this?<p>Is it unity or Godot or something?

What&#x27;s going on at the North pole?

There are so many Cosmos satellites

Already looks like Kessler syndrome.

Doesn&#x27;t work in Brave

what do the flat earthers think about this?

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.<p>Edit: I&#x27;m in Hong Kong.