RFPI weather-satellite ground station

When I started archiving passes from the station, I wanted a way to see them at once instead of scrolling through a catalog table, and this globe is that view. Each dashed line is the orbit predicted from the TLE the station saved for that pass, and each dot is the satellite’s predicted position when the recording started (or, for the weather passes that decoded, at the first image scan). Scrolling plays the passes back in order from September 14 to October 4, the Play button and timeline let you run through them yourself, and selecting a dot shows what the station received on that pass.

I was fairly strict about the positions. Every saved TLE is propagated with SGP4 through Skyfield, converted from TEME into the Earth-fixed ITRS frame, and placed on the WGS84 ellipsoid, and the NASA Blue Marble imagery is mapped onto that same ellipsoid so the orbits and the basemap line up with each other. The TLEs were less than a day old at capture time on average and never more than two days old, which should keep the position error on the order of a few kilometers. That figure is inferred from how fresh the elements were, not measured against a known reference, so treat it as an estimate of propagation error rather than a validated accuracy for the station. What surprised me was how much of the archive could not be placed at all. 135 of the 255 recorded passes are missing something I would need, in almost every case because the capture manifest was never saved, so I left those passes off the globe rather than fill in positions I could not back up.