Online resources
Satellite and earth location
- I have created a table of J2000 day
numbers that is convenient for computing sidereal time.
It covers the years 1991-2014.
- The official US government site for space surveillance data
is Space-Track.
This has information on most satellites tracked by the US: you
can get two-line elements for satellites by ID number, lookup
satellites by common name and international designator, and
get statistics on the catalog. There is also an explanation
of the two-line element format. You must register to use this
site.
- Satellite visibility information is available from Heaven's Above. Given an
earth location and day, this will tell you what satellites and
other celestial phenomenon will be visible and show maps.
- Lookup longitude and latitude for US Post Offices at the Census
Bureau Gazetteer, which will link the result to a map
server. Similar information for any geographic feature in the
US may be found at
the USGS Geographic Names Information Service site.
Worldwide information available at the
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
- NASA's J-Track
provides real-time two and three dimensional maps of satellite
positions. Requires Java on your computer.
Writing
- Writing advice for
scientists and engineers has useful advice if you need
to prepare reports and papers.
- If you need to submit electronic documents, please convert
them to PDFs first. If you are using MacIntosh or Linux, PDF
generation should be automatic. If you are using Windows, you
can use the free software PDFCreator
and use it to generate PDFs by printing the file with
"PDFCreator" selected as the printer.
Last modified: Mon Sep 11 2006