300 Preparation

This page assumes you have completed the installation of Sattools.

#1 Orbital Elements

You should provide sattools with recent orbital elements. This is important in order to get good satellite orbits in Skymap for steering the mount and in the analysis of the images. The script stget retrieves 3 files with track data:

1. Catalog.tle the latest full backup of Space Track catalog with about 15,000 objects
2. Classfd.zip from the website of Mike McCants with the latest orbital elements of 'secret' satellites of which Space Track gives no orbital elements. Classfd.zip is updated with the observations of amateur satellite observers.
3. Inttles.zip from the website of Mike McCants with the calculated present orbital elements of satellites that have not been seen for some time so that they possibly can be observed.

For the 1st file an account is required for SpaceTrack.org and can be requested on www.space-track.org . You should edit the stget.sh file to put in your username/password.

Once you are ready run on your Sattools folder:

script\stget.sh

The files are unpacked, where necessary, and then converted to UNIX format.