Celestia Forums

chris wrote:Another orbital evolution example... 20 orbits of the International Space Station are shown here, with fading enabled to indicate time elapsed. The precession of ISS's inclined orbit is very apparent here.

Note that for this image, I did not use the Celestia's default ISS orbit, which is just a simple ellipse. I'm testing some new code that calculates object positions from NORAD two-line elements. You can see that simple elliptical elements are inadequate for determining the location of satellites in low Earth orbit--the 20 orbits shown in the image are the trajectory of ISS over 30 hours.

--Chris