Satellite Tracking With Orbitron

One of my hobbies is star gazing. I'll go out on the deck at night, either by myself, or with some family and friends and just gaze up at the stars, planets, moon, etc. Of of the exciting parts of this is spotting a satellite, or "mover" as I like to call them. These are faint lights in the sky, that look like stars, but they move slowly across the sky. Some are bright, some are very hard to see, and others fade in and out. Usually the best time to see them is within an hour of two right after it gets dark, or and hour, or two before the sun comes up. That way, you can see the night sky, but the sun is still reflecting off of the satellites, causing it to show up.

The picture shown is one I took of an object that went flying over a few weeks ago. It was a bright, moving light, but since I took it with a 15 second exposure, it shows up as a line instead of a dot. It's actually a Chinese rocket booster called CZ-2C. How do I know this? I use a free program called Orbitron. You can get it free here. It allows you to put in your coordinates and it will show what satellites are going over your area, when they can be seen, if they are visible, etc. You can even go forward, or backward in time to see when an object was there, or when it will be there. It's really a great program and if you do any kind of stargazing, you should really have it on hand.

When you're setting it up, go to Location tab below and put in your latitude, longitude, and altitude. If you don't know that information, here's a great map site that will show you. At the bottom of the map it will tell you're latitude and longitude where your crosshairs are at. Negative numbers are for South and West and positive numbers are used for North and East. So if it was 35.9149556 and -93.856242, you'd put it on there Longitude: 93.8562W and Latitude 35.9149N. I don't think altitude really matters that much, but if you want to be exact, and you know how to read a topo map, click the My Topo tab on that map and find out what the elevation is for your area. It should be in feet, so find a converter in Google, convert it to meters and then plug that number into Orbitron. Name your location and click Add to list.

It will have to update the files every few days to make sure all the tracking data is up to date. You can update this yourself by going to Main>Setup>TLE Updater. Also, while you're in the Setup area, go to where it says Time sync and click the globe with the lightning bolt on it to sync your time. In the main area, if you look over to the right, you can select which ones you want to show up and Load a new TLE group. I only stick with the visible group since that's what I can see.

Just play around with it for a while. You won't always see everything it says you can on there depending on the humidity, light pollution from cities, cloud cover, and other atmospheric disturbances. If you're in the city, I doubt you could see anything. Of course if you're out where you can see stars pretty good, you should be able to name all the little odd lights you see moving in the sky at night, with the exception of UFOs from other planets, or experimental aircraft from our government. In that case, be sure to go here.