STVID

stvid will be a set of python programs to detect and identify satellite tracks on video observations of the night sky, and measure the satellite positions to determine and/or update their orbits.

This software will take over the satellite tracking functionality of my sattools. By porting the functionality to python, and using astropy, and opencv, the software will be easier to install and operate.

This repository will primarily be used for development, and will rely, for the moment, on programs from the sattools repository.

Configuration

Copy the configuration.ini-dist file to configuration.ini
Edit configuration.ini with your preferred settings

Todo

Features to be implemented.

High priority

~~Use sunset/sunrise times for starting/stopping data acquisition.~~
Manual and automatic astrometric calibration.
Recognize unidentified satellite/meteor tracks using 3D Hough transform.

Medium priority

Pause data acquisition of the current line-of-sight (alt/az) is in the Earth's shadow for a particular orbital altitude.
Investigate sensitivity loss of significance=(max-mean)/sigma if the four frame images are stored as 8bit integers instead of floats.

Low priority

Implement python based star finding (stick with source extractor for now).
Migrate to python based SGP4/SDP4 algorithms
Use masks to mask unilluminated CCD areas.
Investigate automatic submission of IOD measurements to SeeSat-L.
Migrate user settings to a configuration file.

Run acquisition at startup

Add user to video group (sudo adduser <username> video).
Add video device to udev rules (add SUBSYSTEM=="video1", GROUP="video", MODE="0660" in /etc/udev/rules.d/10-webcam.rules).
Create start up script in /etc/init.d. Call capture script as user with su <username> -c "capture_1.sh".

License

Licensed under the GPLv3.

2.2 KiB Raw Blame History