Computing satellite postionΒΆ

The orbital module enables computation of satellite position and velocity at a specific time:

>>> from pyorbital.orbital import Orbital
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> orb = Orbital("noaa 18")
>>> now = datetime.utcnow()
>>> # Get normalized position and velocity of the satellite:
>>> orb.get_position(now)
([0.57529384846822862, 0.77384005228105424, 0.59301408257897559],
[0.031846489698768146, 0.021287993461926374, -0.05854106186659274])
>>> # Get longitude, latitude and altitude of the satellite:
>>> orb.get_lonlatalt(now)
(-1.1625895579622014, 0.55402132517640568, 847.89381184656702)