Macintosh Software For Satellite Tracking Applications
As a dedicated Macintosh user, I wanted to run software to help me illustrate what satellites were doing. But finding software for the Mac was extremely difficult. After many hours of effort, and sadly getting very little help from other Mac users, I have compiled these pages to help. Of course there are web pages that allow you to track satellites as well but I have not included them. Maybe some day. Having software on your computer gives you some flexibility that a web page could not provide.
After hacking around for months, it turns out that there is a lot that we can do on the Mac.
The first thing these programs are used for is that I track satellites and contribute observations as a member of a group of international astronomers. I track satellites and hope to generate observations, and help maintain orbital information on a set of satellites that do not have parameters in the Satellite Catalog. Another big need I have is to visualize where satellites are in relation to each other and the ground below them, to generate “ground traces” on a map. This also helps me illustrate the relationship between satellites in space, more about that later. There are two programs that I have found that do this - Gpredict and JSatTrak. Another need I have is to help others track some satellites, and Gpredict and JSatTrak help me predict acquisition times and angles. Then I can suggest to others where and when to look - more about this in later pages on this site.
This is an example from Gpredict of what we can do, display ground traces of satellites. Gpredict is a ported Unix (written for Linux) application, and you have to use a site and command to install it on your Mac. One site is MacPorts, and it works with a software repository of “ported” Unix applications that have been written to run on Macintosh. They retain that blocky Unix look and feel, but they run well. MacPorts seems to be unreliable at times and so I am going to try to install with "Homebrew" which is a comparable installer for ported applications.
I only use a little of what Gpredict does but it has really helped me track satellites.
And I run some C and C++ code as well - one application was written by Tim DeBenedictis of Southern Stars - hopefully with time and permission I may make it available?? I also run some parts of C code that David Vallado has made available - though I have updated it and had two other (far more talented) programmers help me with it. David has a lot of C code available (and Pascal, etc) but it is NOT trivial to try to get it to run.
I also write some C and C++ code as well - to do things like find apogee and perigee from a TLE. You can do this from Excel (which is how I had always done it) but it was fun to write this small tool - and you just put the TLE in the same folder and run the program. If anyone is interested let me know - it is not quite ready for distribution yet but it's priority could go up. It turns out that (once you put the pieces together!) you can write C and C++ applications - and run them from the desktop - fairly quickly. You do need to understand: how to do a few tasks under Unix, how to write some code, and how to get the files where you can find them.
I have certain things that I need and the applications do a lot of that for me - there is certainly a LOT that they do that I have not ever explored. If they do something neat and you tell me about it, I will add it here so others can see.
Now lets see what we can do:
What Do You Want To Do With Software Like This?
by the way these pages are copyrighted by Charles Phillips and you may not use the material from them without express permission. Duh.