satellite constellation visualization
software by Lloyd Wood
The SaVi 1.4 release includes the constellation simulation scripts I've written, as well as enhanced resizeable coverage and fisheye displays.
For real-time 3D animations, SaVi can use Geomview, also originally written at The Geometry Center. These interactive java animations and renderings of constellations will quickly give you a primitive idea of what Geomview can offer.
SaVi's features are described in the SaVi user manual. Satellite constellations are introduced in a tutorial using SaVi.
Download and build SaVi 1.4.0a, released 22 June 2008. This supports varying (1-19) levels of coverage shading for viewing high-diversity constellations such as GPS and Galileo, adds the ability to save high-resolution renderings and screen snapshots of the Geomview camera, either singly or in sequence for postprocessing to make movies, controls Geomview background color, uses sun lighting to demonstrate buggy Geomview lighting, adds support for naming of satellites as a first step to improving TLE reading, improves display of satellite information in main and fisheye windows, compatible with Tk 8.5, works fully on Mac OS X 10.5/Xcode 3.0, with workaround for Leopard menubar problem, adds RapidEye simulation, shows sunlight in Coverage panel and texturemap, works with latest gnu make griping about version.c, disables showing Earth map in Geomview on startup to avoid Mac OS X geomview crash, corrects rosette tool Globalstar defaults, and finally uses inline piping of texturemaps for speed and accuracy where supported by Geomview, using compress2 for Geomview 1.9.5 (handled via inline zlib code in Geomview), and inline gzip format for Geomview 1.9.0 to .4 (which spawn gzip to handle), adds missing sinusoidal and spherical projections, supports shift-clicking multiple satellites and control-clicking ranges of satellites, allows opening and closing the coverage window with new numbers of colours, adds texturemapping of unprojected maps. Texturemapping is vastly improved.
Later development code with bugfixes (25 October 2008) is available.
SaVi requires Tcl/Tk. Depending on your installation of Tcl/Tk, you may need to install the tcl-devel package to obtain header files to compile against.
SaVi is supported via the SaVi users mailing list. There's also a SaVi developers mailing list. SaVi development is stored in the SaVi SourceForge repository.
Any use of SaVi images should credit SaVi (http://savi.sf.net/) from The Geometry Center. There are many examples of use where credit is given.
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