Celestrak Resources

Useful information I gleaned from CelesTrak

CelesTrak has been an immensely useful resource as I learn more about Astrodynamics and satellite tracking. Here’s a few links from that site worth worth noting:

• recent TLE data for 23,837 objects (at this time);
• satcat data for 51,511 objects (at this time);
• visualization powered by the data listed above and cesiumjs, a library provided by Digital Arsenal;
• information about book Fundamental of Astrodynamics and Applications (4th Edition) by David A. Vallado, including links to buy it and associated code/papers;
• a list of satellite tracking software, including some authored by T.S. Kelso, the creator of Celestrak.

About their visualization: as I was writing this post, I realized it has a view for recent conjunctions!

The table is clickable, so you can access a detailed view of particular conjunctions.

I mentioned CDMs before, and this is so far the best source of conjunctions data/visualization I’ve been able to find. I’m intrigued about how it’s implemented, since I don’t see an obvious source of CDMs data (like what you can easily spot for TLEs and the SATCAT, which I linked above). I doubt these are calculated on the fly. More investigation needed!