[ubj]

Those long, straight-line convoys of Starlink satellites are fascinating. There's a few of them I could see scattered around the Earth. At what point do they start breaking up into unrelated orbits?

Looking forward to using this website to try spotting satellites at night. There's something strangely thrilling about seeing objects in the night sky that were placed there by people.

[modeless]

For spotting satellites at night, try my site: https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/

Most of the satellites shown on the Leolabs site are too dim to see without a telescope because they don't reflect enough light. My site calculates brightness and filters down to the ones that you can see with the unaided eye.

There are still quite a few! ISS in particular is very bright and can even be seen before sunset. The new Chinese space station Tiangong is also a good one to try. In the next few weeks it's expected that the recently launched BlueWalker-3 will become quite bright too as it expands its enormous phased array antenna (64 square meters!). But the coolest is probably if you can catch a recently launched Starlink train, 50 satellites all visible simultaneously or within seconds of each other. (A few weeks after launch the Starlink satellites are no longer visible as they reach their operational orbits.)

[Kucher]

I have used your site to successfully spot Starlink trains and the ISS several times. It's very well-designed and the included street view overlay especially helps with knowing where in the sky to look.

Thank you!

[rebelde]

This site is great and is one of my favorites. I occasionally check it and set an alarm on my phone. I will announce to the people that I am with "satellites passing in 3 minutes", run outside and impress people. Great fun. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

[101008]

Wow. I allowed Chrome to know my location for the first time and Street View was in my front door. I thought it was going to use the IP but it's impossible to be that accurate, does it Chrome use my Home on my profile location or something like that?

[Thorrez]

When you enable location, Chrome will send some pieces of information about your computer to Google Location Services to get your GPS location. Then Chrome sends that GPS location to the site you're visiting. Using information from your profile wouldn't be accurate if you were e.g. at a coffee shop.

>The information that Chrome sends to Google Location Services may include:

>The Wi-Fi routers closest to you

>Cell IDs of the cell towers closest to you

>The strength of your Wi-Fi or cell signal

>The IP address that is currently assigned to your device

https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/

Disclosure: I work at Google but not on anything related to this.

[justshowpost]

This sounds like I work for Schutzstaffel but just doing paperwork for them

[Thorrez]

I put the "not on anything related to this" part in to clarify that although I'm speaking about Google and work at Google, I'm not really a firsthand source, I'm just providing thirdhand information.

[netrus]

The Street View cars log information about wifi access points, and use wifi data from your device to guess your location.

[modeless]

I believe this data mainly comes from phones, not street view cars. There are about a million times more phones out there than street view cars, and they all have GPS and Wifi. Apple had this feature long before Apple Maps was a thing, and they didn't license Street View data from Google.

[CompuHacker]

That'd explain the changes to Location Services on Android over the past several years.

[milosmns]

Is it related to Android though? I read somewhere/thought that it is primarily the Google Maps cars recording WiFi data and not phones). Europe wouldn't be covered at all if it was coming from the phones, right? (GDPR)

I mean, you can have a street full of iPhones - which I assume is a regular occurrence in USA, where people trust Apple - and still Google Maps on iPhone would guess well enough where you are. For example, I'm far away from the street and Google hasn't passed here recently, so my WiFi-based location is always way off (using Android). In my other home (and vacation home in another country) it's the opposite, because the cars have passed quite recently.

The story checks out so far for me... but I am kinda lazy to search for the source on this right now, so pls share if you have it.

[jhugo]

> Europe wouldn't be covered at all if it was coming from the phones, right? (GDPR)

Which part of GDPR would prevent Google from collecting pairs of (Wi-Fi BSSID, approx lat/lon), with the consent that you gave when you set up your Android phone, and using it for their own purpose without giving it to any third party?

[prazgaitis]

This site is really cool, and I love your blog post explaining how it works. Hats off, fantastic work!

[madacol]

post https://james.darpinian.com/blog/how-see-a-satellite-tonight...

[shallichange]

Thanks for your site! I used it with my kids during COVID lockdown to watch the ISS and other satellites. It’s great

[justshowpost]

Forced to keep eyes at the floor (for your own good, of course)

[kubi07]

I just watched Tiangong space station with my bare eyes. Beautiful. Looking forward to watch 14 starlink satellites tomorrow. Thank you so much for your website.

[dillondoyle]

Wow that's so big it's hard to visualize. Their website shows just how giant that is.

Does this mean the US probably has satellites that can easily pick up cell signals anywhere in the world from space?

https://ast-science.com/spacemobile-network/bluewalker-3/

[97s]

Hey just want to say thanks a ton for making this. My son and I went out side and laid on the patio watching the starlink sats pass by and it was neat. We never realized that they were there.

[dirtyid]

The nightmode streetview is very cool.

[eskaytwo]

That’s awesome. We have a few upcoming for the southern hemisphere. Excited to see them!

[spookyuser]

I love you saw a train a while back because of your site

[rmorey]

This is really well done, I will try it out tonight!

[jgtrosh]

I can't tell if the times are for my timezone?

[modeless]

Times are displayed in the time zone your device's clock is set to. Unless you use the "Change Location" feature, in which case local time zone of the selected location will be used, with explicit time zone abbreviations shown.

[jlpom]

Your website is very well designed, thanks

[ubj]

Very nice! Thanks for sharing this--looking forward to using your website!

[flavmartins]

Fantastic site!

[club_tropical]

Very cool.

[mlindner]

> At what point do they start breaking up into unrelated orbits?

It's not as easy to see as in this visualization, but Jonathan McDowell (https://twitter.com/planet4589) posts graphs on his website of each launch of starlink satellites as they raise orbits. https://planet4589.org/space/stats/star/starstats.html

Scroll down to the individual launches and there's images you can click on of the orbit raising progress of each launch.

Example of the Starlink 4-21 mission that launched on July 7th of this year: https://planet4589.org/space/stats/star/spl51.jpg (One satellite failed, which isn't that unusual, and will de-orbit probably sometime early next year if they don't recover it.)

[mncharity]

And the adjacent graphs show phase (line growing longer, spreading along an orbit), and plane (line breaking into multiple lines slotting into nearby orbits). Positioning is accomplished by spending time at different-than-deployed altitudes, mostly lower. Lower gives a difference in nodal precession (Earth being non-spherical), IIRC something vaguely like half a degree/day difference out of several deg/day, slowly changing plane westward. Thus plane changes take weeks of drifting. Launch being far more about "go fast (in some direction)" than "while being high", rapid plane change (direction change) would have prohibitive "launch-like" energy cost. So a single launch will populate one or few nearby planes. And finally lower orbits orbit faster, quickly overtaking deployed sats in a single plane to reach deployment positions. Kerbal Space Program is thought a fun way to play with such.

[dwringer]

> At what point do they start breaking up into unrelated orbits?

I can't speak with any authority, but in general a train of satellites would likely be moving in an orbit with either the apogee/perigee similar to the target orbits, but the other end of the orbit being higher or lower. Each time the train reaches the extremum at the target altitude, one of the satellites thrusts to adjust the other side of its orbit to target, which pushes it out of the pack.

The specifics may be so different as to make that explanation totally wrong but it's probably not too far from the general principle.

[bagels]

They don't break up in to unrelated orbits. They simply spread out along the same orbit by varying the period for a few weeks.

[rtkwe]

They do raise their orbit to 540-560km from what looks like ~350km launch orbit.

[stvnbn]

Have you tried to look at the objects not placed by humans?

[kidme5]

Looks familiar...(!)

https://youtu.be/fEkXTV69yo4?t=22s

[mlindner]

How's this related?

[s1artibartfast]

It just shows what an orbiting satellite constellation looks like and why so many are required. That is the similarity

[kaboomerizer]

>> https://youtu.be/fEkXTV69yo4?t=22s

Holy S$#! I didn't know about that.

Are there links between this Space Force project and Starlink?

[s1artibartfast]

It just shows what an orbiting satellite constellation looks like and why so many are required. That is the similarity

[georgeg23]

Actually SpaceX IS working on what that video shows:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities

[mlindner]

No, SpaceX is NOT working on space based interceptors, as your link clearly shows.