If you zoom in you can see them moving. Click on them to see their tracks. I'm surprised how random the orbits seem. It's too cloudy at the moment but maybe on a clear night I can check the accuracy by looking up.
Half a year ago, I captured a photograph of a long train of satellites. However, when I navigate to that location using this tool, I don’t see any satellite train present at that specific timestamp.
I wonder if there are other satellites not included in this dataset, or if I should search way further from the location on the map
Why are there demarcations towards the poles where the satellite density drops off? Seems Norway, Sweden and Finland have a much lower density of satellites .
Just thinking out loud: given that we know positions of these satellites, is one able to use it for non-gps navigation? Either by using vision - by tracking or by using some electromagnetic specter - listening to satellites...
Not impossible but it's not as easy as dedicated GNSS satellites. The ranging codes in a GNSS signal are what makes it easy to find your distance from the transmitter. Starlink doesn't have that, there are some observables you could use but it's not simple.
Nice site, but I'm really missing any altitude reference for the satellites. It's hard to use any satellite tracker with any degree of utility other than as a toy website when it's exceedingly difficult to determine and compare basic altitude information across different satellites.
To get a better sense of the scale, if you are viewing this app on a 4K display, with the planet measuring about 2,000 pixels across Earth’s diameter is approximately 12,742 km (7,918 miles), so each pixel represents about 6.37 km (3.96 miles).
A Starlink satellite is roughly 6 m (20 ft) wide without its solar panels. This means a one-pixel satellite marker is shown at roughly 1,000 times its true size. So even if this image already looks extremely crowded, the dots are still massively exaggerated. Visually, there would be roughly another factor of 1,000 before the satellites themselves were shown at their true scale—although this does not mean that orbit could easily accommodate 1,000 times more satellites but I guess there is still some space in space.
There's already so many starlinks in some bits of LEO that a single sat breaking up will lead to a runaway chain reaction that breaks up everything in that orbit quicker than the debris will decay out of it:
> The results indicate the current population of intact objects exceeds the unstable threshold at all altitudes between 400 km and 1000 km and the runaway threshold at nearly all altitudes between 520 km and 1000 km.
I just released a new update to mine yesterday with ranges and the ability to make a story of multiple saved scenes. Then they can be played back at a presentation later.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 23.7 ms ] threadI wonder if there are other satellites not included in this dataset, or if I should search way further from the location on the map
https://navi.ion.org/content/72/1/navi.685
A Starlink satellite is roughly 6 m (20 ft) wide without its solar panels. This means a one-pixel satellite marker is shown at roughly 1,000 times its true size. So even if this image already looks extremely crowded, the dots are still massively exaggerated. Visually, there would be roughly another factor of 1,000 before the satellites themselves were shown at their true scale—although this does not mean that orbit could easily accommodate 1,000 times more satellites but I guess there is still some space in space.
> The results indicate the current population of intact objects exceeds the unstable threshold at all altitudes between 400 km and 1000 km and the runaway threshold at nearly all altitudes between 520 km and 1000 km.
https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...
Moreover, are the satellites all moving around like that, haphazardly?
https://www.spacebook.com/
But the sad reality many of the hardware is Elon Musk's ejaculation stains, polluting the skies.
Cool app though, have it on a large screen at our work to visualise the constellations we work with as a fun screensaver type thing.