Thread: Stellarium
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Old 25-01-2008, 04:02 PM
Barrykgerdes
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Barrykgerdes is offline
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Beaumont Hills NSW
Posts: 2,900
Hi Jason

At the moment the only calculation for satellites is done by a comet orbit routine. This is accurate enough for comets and and minor planets etc but is not good enough for earth orbiting satellites. When someone writes a routine to use the TLE's for display in stellarium it should be great. In the mean time two or three of the users have written TLE conversion programs that extract all the comet elements useable data into a form that Stellarium can use for comets and minor planets but it is not suitable for near earth orbiters.

I wrote one in QBasic that uses the TLE data but it runs into the accuracy problem although it appears to work OK. Also if you want to catch a satellite with the telescope you need to update your TLE's regularly.

I have just compiled the latest SVN build #2807. There has been a change to the Time zone reference and the default is now GMT so you need to enter your time offset in the config.ini file. This method however may change before the next release.

Barry

Barry
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