What Do You Want To Do?

Unfortunately this site is not designed to explain orbital mechanics. It must assume that a lot of this is already familiar and you want to run some familiar tasks on your Mac. I will try to provide some support via my Contact Me link but cannot promise a lot of support.

This site is also not set up to explain much about Unix and the software that runs under the Mac user interface. I will try to answer questions via the Contact Me link and I will try to continue to improve these pages.

Of course we all want to just install software and run neat stuff! But then we are not sure what neat stuff is; have you ever installed software and then tried to think of what to do next? I must confess that I have.

With these programs - you can display “ground traces” of satellites, you can get some idea of what their orbits are and what those orbits are good for. Maybe you want to know when a satellite, for instance the International Space Station, will be visible from your home. With one of these programs you will know when and where to look.

Maybe you want to see what the ground trace of various types of orbits will look like - low orbits like the ISS, higher ones like the Space Telescope, orbits with higher and lower inclinations, geosynchronous orbits.

This image (from JSatTrak) shows two Molniya satellites and the odd ground trace tells you a few things. These satellites are NOT in circular orbits, they are in high eccentricity orbits with perigee in the Southern Hemisphere. Apogee is in the Northern Hemisphere and they tend to appear to "hang" within a few degrees for a large part of the orbit. If Molyniya 3-50 was listening to radio broadcasts below, it could hear them for much of the time that it was near apogee. This is a good ground trace since it looks a lot like a smile.

So before proceeding - think of a few satellites that you are interested in. I will have some suggestions at the end of this site.