Octobre 2005 : LibSatLib is 0.1 beta
LibSatLib is a free (opensource) library to compute artificial satellites orbital parameters, and positions.
With LibSatLib you will be able to compute next pass of a choosen satellite.
Observing ISS (International Space Ship) is a great moment : a very bright spot travelling through the sky and sometimes lighting off suddenly. But we need to predict this passes to look at sky at the right moment. That's the reason for making this library. Every software needinf this feature could use it. (according to license)
One purpose is choosing an astrophotography field and compute if a satellite will go through when we shoot this part of the sky.
We will increase LibSatLib features more and more up to make a usefull stuff
This Library is licensed under GPL. Some Libraries are licensed under LGPL but we prefer GPL for 2 majors reasons :
We've done LibSatLib with "Predict" pieces of code. Predict is under GPL so LibSatLib must be under GPL.
A software using LibSatLib must be in GPL. No
possibility to use LibSatLib on a closed source software. It's our
wish
Patrick Chevalley (Carte du ciel, Skychart), Vincent Suc et Jean-Baptiste Butet have initiated this project. However, code was based onPredict, http://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/predict.html
A great thanks to Arnaud Renard for the design.
For the moment LibSatLib can :
Give date of next choosen satellites pass.
Give satellites position with a time "step".
For the moment, LibSatLib is on Sourceforge CVS. A tar file will be done when we'll release
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/predictsatlib loginun simple "make" suffira a compiler la lib.
Adding Sun and Moon positions in order to compute eclipses or transits.
Adding magnitude estimation algorithms
Cleaning code
Adding a good gestion of TLEs