starlink-constellation-animation

Animated scatter plots of Starlink satellite orbital parameters

I used this code to make this video: https://youtu.be/zYPJtTgS060

This all started out as an attempt to recreate Elias Eccli's Starlink animations (http://youtu.be/rddTXl_7Wr8).

Procedure

1. Make an account on space-track.org and download the SGP4 propagator. From the SGP4 propagator that you downloaded, copy SampleCode/Python/DriverExamples/Sgp4Prop/src/wrappers/ into the src folder of this project. (AstroUtils.py also comes from there)
2. shell_commands.txt -- download satellite info and TLEs from space-track.org
3. get_starlink_launch_info.py -- Get list of Starlink launches from, err, Wikipedia
4. get_starlink_ids.py -- Make list of NORAD IDs of Starlink launches
5. filter_save_tles.py -- Parse the TLEs, exclude the ones that look bad, and save the remaining TLE data as numpy arrays in .npz files
6. load_filtered_tles.py -- Load some filtered TLE data, propagate using SGP4 propagator, make some plots
   6.1. This script requires setting the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the path to your SGP4 propagator.
   6.2. At this point, you might want to clean the data more. You might also want to adjust ..\input\reference_satellite_1.inp to your liking (I came up with this by much trial and error).
7. make_animation_data.py -- Make and save the information needed for the animated scatter plots.
   7.1. Also requires setting the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the path to your SGP4 propagator.
8. export_animation.py -- Load the animation data, make the animations, save as a MP4 video. This can take hours to run.

License

The code that comes from the SGP4 propagator (src/AstroUtils.py and parts of src/SatProp.py) are under the SGP4 Open License. All other code in this repo is released under the license in the following file: LICENSE.