NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Navigation with the ISS video
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2016 Apr 8, 23:20 -0700
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2016 Apr 8, 23:20 -0700
The very nice ISS video showing the airglow layers has plenty of stars for navigation.? As a quick hack, I put the frames through the astrometry.net solver and then estimated the circle on the sky that a reference point on the camera was making.
Attached is the right ascension and declination of each of the 390 frames, a picture of the likelihood surface, and the code.? The x axis shows the declination of the point normal to the orbit and the y axis its right ascension.? The most likely declination is near 37.5 degrees, so the inclination of the orbit is the complement, 52.5 degrees, in reasonable agreement with ISS's nominal inclination of 51.65 degrees.? The other coordinate is related to the orbit's RAAN, right ascension of ascending node.
The rest of the orbital parameters would need video timestamps and horizon detection (or identifiable ground points).
It would have been better to refine the individual positions by postprocessing with a tool like scamp---that would make them much less noisy.
Cheers,
Peter
File:
File: 135085.pole.py
File:
