I set up the cameras tonight, pointed at the most clear night sky, to take pictures of satellites.
Still a bit too bright to get any sats, but detections should start in a few minutes.
I'm running `stvid`: "Satellite tracking with video cameras."
https://github.com/cbassa/stvid
Then each morning I upload the orbits of classified satellites to the seesat mailing list.
Staring tonight with 8,118 unique sats in the Spacecruft archive.
When the sky is clear I run cameras pointed at the sky to take photos of satellites overhead.
The satellites get identified by NORAD ID, then pictures and orbit data get uploaded to this server, sorted by ID:
I started tonight with 7,974 unique satellites in the archive. I would expect to end the night with over 8,000 different satellites photographed.
The image attached shows the #stvid software processing the data in semi-realtime.
@cgbassa did some analysis of the data with his sattools software; he is also the author of stvid, which was used to acquire and process the images.
The picture is a plot of the data. The night sky is plotted what it looks like from my location at 05:14 UTC (late night local).
The yellow plots show what satellites are in the sky at that moment, with ID.
Red are photos I took.
White are stars; blue lines constellations.
Just got a huge bright train of sats, but I'm not sure what they are.
A whole bunch starting 7xxxx, which afaik isn't used yet. Will need to poke into it, maybe temporary IDs.
Seven cameras are running.
One isn't set up with focus yet...
A couple are just getting "red" which is due to clouds.
The nice thing about a bunch of cameras. They photograph different parts of the sky that are clear on a partly cloudy night as the clouds move across the sky.
So in an hour, perhaps, the red ones will be getting sats while another part of the sky is obscured by clouds.
With feedback from Pierros, this is what I've come up with for a colorblind friendly palette for stvid.
I have been working on a color palette for stvid that works with various conditions of colorblindness.
I used this website to test the images:
The colors I am limited to is the Matplotlib "named colors".
On another note, it looks like McCants' old domain has finally turned off, so the web URL for classified TLEs (orbits) had to be changed in stvid.
New classified satellite TLE URLs:
https://mmccants.org/tles/classfd.zip
https://mmccants.org/tles/inttles.zip
The file "update_tle.py" needs the new URLs.
It was supposed to be crappy skies tonight, but it turned pretty clear and now is supposed to be clear.
So cameras are out! I have seven running now. I built another today.
Photos are of satellites and their tracks in the sky. Then some fancy software figures out which satellite it is based on the track. Magick.
Archive now up to 7,250 unique satellites photographed and identified. Organized by ID here:
I'm checking out for the night I can barely type straight, too sleepy. Cameras will run all night. They'll get the most sats at dawn.
Jeff Moe