A full sky star chart showing the view from a camera mounted on a earth orbiting satellite.
This is a Python program using Tkinter, matplotlib.pyplot, PyVista, and various astronomy, scientific, and satellite packages (i.e. Astropy, SciPy, and SGP4).
It's goal is to run a simulation of a satellite in earth orbit with an attached camera and caculate which stars would be seen in the cameras sensor.
Visualization is provided by default with camera paramaters (like focus length) being capable of being adjusted on the fly.
See Satellite Camera Viewer Documentation and API reference along with this README file.
$ git clone https://github.com/mahtin/satellite-camera-viewer.git
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$ python -m src.SatelliteCameraViewer
$$ pip install git+https://github.com/mahtin/satellite-camera-viewer.git
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$ satellitecameraviewer
$Or use a release file directly.
$ RELEASE='0.4.1'
$ pip install https://github.com/mahtin/satellite-camera-viewer/releases/download/$RELEASE/satellite_camera_viewer-$RELEASE-py3-none-any.whl
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$ satellitecameraviewer
$$ pip install satellite-camera-viewer
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$ satellitecameraviewer$ mkdir ~/whatever
$ cd ~/whatever
$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
(.venv) $ pip install git+https://github.com/mahtin/satellite-camera-viewer.git
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(.venv) $ satellitecameraviewer
(.venv) $ deactivate
$The healpy package can be hard to install within a Windows environment.
$ pip install 'healpy>=1.19.0'
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ERROR: Failed building wheel for healpy
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$The code will run without this package (and hence it's not in requirements.txt anymore). You will just be missing one of the FOV functions.
All the camera pointing math is done within SatelliteCamera and that contains it's own [README]
Angularcoordinate on the celestial sphere analogous to longitude. See: Wikipedia – Right Ascension
Angularcoordinate analogous to latitude. See: Wikipedia – Declination
Earth‑centeredinertial coordinate system used for celestial pointing. See: Wikipedia – Celestial Reference System
TrueEquator Mean Equinox frame used by SGP4 orbit propagator. See: Vallado, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics and Applications
4‑componentrotation representation used for spacecraft attitude. SeeReference: Wikipedia – Quaternion
Standardoptical projection model used in computer vision and spacecraft optics. See: Wikipedia – Pinhole Camera Model
Hierarchicalequal‑area pixelization of the sphere. See: HEALPix
The requirements.txt file defines what works well; however, its been tested with the newest releases listed below.
Package Tested Minimum
astropy 8.0.1 7.2.0
Cartopy 0.25.0 0.25.0
matplotlib 3.11.1 3.10.0
numpy 2.5.1 2.4.0
pillow 12.3.0 12.2.0
pyvista 0.48.4 0.47.0
requests 2.34.2 2.33.0
scipy 1.18.0 1.17.0
sgp4 2.27 2.25
spherical_geometry 1.4.0 1.4.0
An automatically generated CHANGELOG is provided here.
As always, open issues or pull requests should you need via here.
Copyright (C) 2023-2026 Martin J Levy - W6LHI/G8LHI - @mahtin - https://github.com/mahtin