Revised Spacetrack algorithm available

Revised Spacetrack algorithm available

A thread today in Yahoo's XEphem group, which supports the free research-
grade astronomy program XEphem available for *BSD, Linux, MacOS X, UNIX
and Windows and available at http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/
and which I've been using for over 2 decades in all its incarnations,
discussed a very interesting AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and
Astronautics) 2006 paper whose authors went through all of the
Spacetrack-derived algorithms they could find online and put together a
comprehensive update for the algorithm "designed to be highly compatible
with recent DoD versions".

XEphem's author already acknowledged he'll be incorporating the updated
algorithm for satellite tracking. The paper includes extensive source
code for the improved algorithm and is available he

http://celestrak.com/publications/AIAA/2006-6753/AIAA-2006-6753.pdf

and is only 1.1 MB and 88 pages.

XEphem, besides all its planetarium and research capabilities, can also
directly drive most computerized scopes (e.g., LX200 families, etc.).

A few examples of some of its charting capabilities I frequently use:

http://thadlabs.com/FILES/Mars_retro_2003.pdf
http://thadlabs.com/FILES/Mars_retro_2003.txt tabular form
http://thadlabs.com/FILES/Mars_retro_2005.pdf
http://thadlabs.com/FILES/Mars_retro_2007.pdf
http://thadlabs.com/FILES/Mars_retro_2010.pdf
http://thadlabs.com/FILES/Jupiter_retro_2010_FW_9.pdf
http://thadlabs.com/FILES/Jupiter_retro_2010_FW_18.pdf
http://thadlabs.com/FILES/Jupiter_retro_2010_FW_180.pdf

Though it's a UNIX program, it works on ALL operating systems:

http://thadlabs.com/PIX/Ubuntu_8.04.4_LTS.png Linux
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/xephem.jpg Vista, Win7, WinXP
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/XEphem_RedHat.png
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/XEphem_Ubuntu.png
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/XEphem_Vista.jpg

Some interesting examples of some of the animations it can create can be
seen on its home page:

http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/

On Jan 18, 4:57*pm, Thad Floryan wrote:

Though it's a UNIX program, it works on ALL operating systems:

Well, it works on all currently popular operating systems for the x86
platform. It doesn't even run on eComStation, let alone OS/360 or MTS
or OS 2200.

Never mind trying to run it on GEORGE.

There have been a _lot_ of operating systems around...

John Savard

On Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:50:04 -0800 (PST), Quadibloc
wrote:

On Jan 18, 4:57*pm, Thad Floryan wrote:

Though it's a UNIX program, it works on ALL operating systems:

Well, it works on all currently popular operating systems for the x86
platform. It doesn't even run on eComStation, let alone OS/360 or MTS
or OS 2200.

Never mind trying to run it on GEORGE.

There have been a _lot_ of operating systems around...

Yes, but these days you can run an awful lot of operating systems on
the same hardware, due to virtualization. My primary computer is a
64-bit Intel box running Windows 7, and under that I run a virtual
machine which currently has operating instances of DOS, Windows XP,
Windows 7-32, OS X, Ubuntu Linux, and RT-11. And there are lots of
other possibilities.

The easiest way to run a Unix only application like XEphem commercial
on a Windows machine is to do it in a Linux VM. It's pretty trivial to
set up.

In article
,
Quadibloc wrote:

On Jan 18, 4:57Â*pm, Thad Floryan wrote:

Though it's a UNIX program, it works on ALL operating systems:

Well, it works on all currently popular operating systems for the x86
platform. [...]

I don't know about the current version, but I have XEphem on my Mac G5.
So it's not just for systems with Intel CPUs -- in this case they're IBM
PowerPC. (XEphem runs under X11, which was included with the OS.)

--
Odysseus