[amsat-bb] Re: Satellite Orbit Prediction in Python

[Joseph Armbruster]

Mark,

I dug into the PyEphem code a bit and slapped together my own script  
that will:

- snatch the latest keps from amsat.org
- find all passes taking place within the next N minutes ( this is  
configurable)
- provide the user with text / verbal status updates on whatever  
interval desired.

Feel free to take a look here:

http://libjoe.blogspot.com/2009/10/where-is-my-satellite-in-python.html

For the record, DO NOT SET LAT OR LONG TO A DOUBLE VALUE.  Sorry for  
screaming but... sometimes... you just have to :-)  I had a bit of  
test code that I wrote and took forever trying to figure out why my  
local pass times were not coming out correctly.  It turned out that  
the UTC times were off as well... I traced this back to initializing  
my lat/long observer values using a doubleobject as opposed to a  
stringobject.  You have been warned.  I sure hope I didn't miss this  
in the documentation somewhere...  All I could find on these in the  
documentation (without any digging into any of the code) was:
These are the attributes you can set:

date — Date and time
epoch — Epoch for astrometric RA/dec
lat — Latitude
long — Longitude
elevation — Elevation (m)
temp — Temperature (°C)
pressure — Atmospheric pressure (mBar)


Joe


On Sep 28, 2009, at 2:06 AM, Mark VandeWettering wrote:

> I just thought I'd drop a quick note here about some fun I've been
> having today with satellite orbit prediction in Python.   When I
> started mucking around with satellites, I used "predict", which was
> pretty good, but at some point I wanted to answer some questions which
> weren't easy to answer using predict.   Questions like "when will
> AO-51 be visible from both my home in CM87 and locations in Hawaii",
> or "what was the radius of the circle of visibility for AO-7 compared
> to ISS"?
>
> Luckily, I'm a programmer.   In fact, I'm a programmer who programs
> for fun.   So, I did a bit of research, and then coded up a version of
> G3RUH's "Plan 13" algorithm in Python, and then wrote some scripts to
> download elements from celestrak, and then a simple one to print data
> on the next pass of any named satellite.     And, they worked pretty
> good.  I've used them for the last year or so to do all my pass
> predictions.   But there are still a couple of minor issues with the
> library.  It didn't handle geosynchronous satellites very well.   It
> implemented only the most basic of orbital models.   I was never
> confident that the "is this satellite in eclipse" stuff working
> exactly right.
>
> Luckily though, it turns out that someone else has been busy writing a
> more complete library: PyEphem http://rhodesmill.org/pyephem/
>
> It's a library whose primary purpose is to calculate the positions of
> astronomical objects.    I've used it a couple of times to (for
> instance) figure out the size of Mars compared to Jupiter, and found
> it very easy to use.   But today, I realized that it had a full
> implementation of the SGP4 and SDP4 orbital models built in, and could
> be used to predict satellite passes.    As a proof of concept, I
> hacked together a 23 line script that could print the details of
> upcoming ISS passes.   It seems to work great, and is really quite
> easy to use.
>
> You can find some of the simple example code at my blog:
>
> http://brainwagon.org/2009/09/27/how-to-use-python-to-predict-satellite-locations/
>
> I'll probably be porting all of my existing scripts to use this soon.
> In the mean time, if you have a similar task, you might look to it to
> solve your custom satellite prediction problems.
>
> 73 Mark K6HX
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