Celestia Forums

I have just gotten into using Celestria, after reading about it in Discover
Mag. After the usual zooming around looking at various things,
getting lost, and finding my way "home", I settled down to look
at the available earth orbiting spacecraft. I have tracked and used
the various Amsat birds over the last 20 years or so, and compared
the ISS position depicted to the actual position only to find an error of about
one half an orbit. Is there any way to update the orbital elements used
by Celestria from time to time to keep things where they belong?
Shadow 432

shadow 432,

Welcome to the forum!

Unfortunately, as yet no one has written a program or script to automatically update the orbital elements of satellites for Celestia.

The parameters in most addons are for specific dates (the Epoch in an EllipticalOrbit definition), so they're not going to be right for today. There are quite a few external influences that cause satellites to drift away from where they used to be.

Grant Hutchison wrote a spreadsheet that can translate TLEs into Celestia's format. See http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/hutchison/spreadsheets.html#3