I want to try a cool project that will use a laser pen and a couple of servos to project the position of a satellite I choose in realtime on the wall/ceiling in my lounge. But I need a realtime feed of the coordinates of the satellite to give to the servo so that I can display the laser spot in the correct position in the lounge. Does anyone know where I can get a simple coordinate feed from the internet to read from my arduino? Really need your help! Thanks
You probably have enough computer power to calculate the position from the orbital elements:
CelesTrak can provide the orbital elements: CelesTrak: Current Space Track NORAD Two-Line Element Sets
Back in the day I (and I think also some NASA stations) used the below program for satellite tracking. If your pc has accurate timing, the program is amazingly accurate. I compared live video feeds from space station to the program prediction for when the station would move from light to dark. Accurate to maybe within one or two seconds.
That's really helpful. Thanks. Will look at the links and give it a go! Will post some of our design thoughts and implementation as we go along.
If you run Linux, there is Predict.
in server mode it outputs altitude and azimuth for a given satellite on port 1280.
Predict does other cool stuff as well.
As far as I know, stsplus doesn't output tracking info, my copy doesn't.