1Satellites Plugin for Stellatium 2================================ 3 4INTRODUCTION 5============ 6 7This feature has been requested so many times it's not funny. Several 8people have posted to the developer list saying they would like to have a 9go and then the Yeti seem to get them and we never hear another thing. 10 11Well, dagnammit, I thought I'd have a go. 12 13Projection is done from the azimuth/elevation data which the SDP4/SGP4 14library handily produces. Probably not the "right" way to do it, but 15it works and I am lazy. 16 17 18TODO 19==== 20 21Things originally planned for 0.8.0 that didn't get finished: 22+ Fixing the main configuration file subkey format 23+ Editable satellite descriptions 24+ TLE set validation/parsing with regular expressions (I have partial. --BM) 25+ GUI for manual addition of satellites, including TLE entry 26+ GUI for manual addition of comm frequences 27+ Reuse of downloaded update files for the current mechanism of satellite adding 28 - Option to download fresh files 29+ Move the current satellite import from the GUI to the core class (makes easier 30plug-in GUI porting) 31 32+ extracting orbit epoch from TLE and adding an option to hide satellites 33outside a range around the epoch 34+ GUI: color-picker control 35+ picking default and individual hint color (and orbit color? was that 36a separate thing?) 37+? option which info fields to display (or at least, just for the "extra" fields) 38+? re-organize configuration file options? (group flags with a "flag_" prefix?) 39 40Matthew's notes: 41+ Rendering of the actual satellite, not just a hint/label 42 - calculation of brightness, eclipse etc. 43 - iridium flares? 44+ gravity labels 45 46Longer term: 47+ proper 3d positions (when SolarSystem is refactored so we can see 48 satellite cloud from the moon / other bodies. 49 50 51BUILDING THE PLUGIN 52=================== 53 54Please note, these instructions are only directly applicable to Linux. 55Windows and OSX targets will probably require modification of the 56CMakeLists.txt file. 57 580. Install and build the Bazaar version of Stellarium as per the 59instructions on the Stellarium wiki: 60 61 http://stellarium.org/wiki/index.php/Compilation_on_Linux 62 631. Set the environment variable STELROOT to the root of the Stellarium 64source tree. The Stellarium build directory is expected to be: 65 66 $STELROOT/builds/unix 67 682. Create a sub-directory builds/unix and change into that directory. 69 703. Run: 71 72 cmake ../.. 73 make 74 make install 75 76If all goes well, the relevant files should be built and copied to your 77~/.stellarium/modules directory. 78 79 80ACKNOWLEGDEMENTS 81================ 82 83Re-write of orbital calculation routines by Jose Luis Canales, added 84Autumn 2010. 85 86Original SGP4/SDP4 implementation taken from KTrack codebase. There were 87some minor modifications to prevent conflicts with #defines and enums 88from the core Stellarium code, but nothing significant. 89 90The code which uses the SGP4/SDP4 library was copied more or less 91verbatim from KTrack up to the point of getting the alt/azi and other 92data out. 93 94 95