Celestia Forums

Hi
I am a new user and I want to display Satellites. I have information about them in TLE format. Is it possible to convert to SSC format or similar?

Thanks.

Pedro

I hacked together a perl script a while back to do this:
http://www.skullcave.com/celestia/tle2ssc.pl
Open it up in a text program to see how it works and edit it as needed. You need Perl installed to run the script, of course.

Ortolan wrote:I hacked together a perl script a while back to do this:
http://www.skullcave.com/celestia/tle2ssc.pl
Open it up in a text program to see how it works and edit it as needed. You need Perl installed to run the script, of course.

I tried to download the Perl script, but your web server complained that access to the document was forbidden. There was no trouble getting the .ssc files. Is the server doing some special handling of .pl files? Perhaps they should be renamed to *.pl.txt or something.

I'm interested in possibly supporting TLE files as a new orbit type. I noticed that on celestrak.com, there are sets of TLEs available for most of the shuttle missions. It'd be great to turn these into a Celestia add-on that recreates almost every space shuttle mission.

--Chris

Thanks for letting me know about the perl files. The files are served from a hosting company so unfortunately I don't have total control over the server settings. I could probably solve the issue through .htaccess files somehow but in the meantime I've renamed the .pl files to .pl.txt as you suggested.

Ortolan wrote:Thanks for letting me know about the perl files. The files are served from a hosting company so unfortunately I don't have total control over the server settings. I could probably solve the issue through .htaccess files somehow but in the meantime I've renamed the .pl files to .pl.txt as you suggested.

Even the renamed files are not accessible . . . Are the permissions wrong, perhaps?

--Chris

Well that's weird, the permissions are all ok, the server must be using some funky extension detection or something. Renamed them to .perlscript and they seem to download fine now.

I used the tle2ssc script and tried out the ISS coordinates published by NASA. They still seem to be a bit off, about 12 minutes or so. Is something wrong with the script, or more probably, I guess with something in such a fast orbit, Celestia will never be able to model it accurately.

tonypro2 wrote:I used the tle2ssc script and tried out the ISS coordinates published by NASA. They still seem to be a bit off, about 12 minutes or so. Is something wrong with the script, or more probably, I guess with something in such a fast orbit, Celestia will never be able to model it accurately.

Incidentally, that's how this is solved in XEphem: just one click



Perhaps one day, we will get around to something similar in Celestia...

Bye Fridger