Show HN: Orbit – AR satellite tracker, watch 15k+ objects

(nagylukas.github.io)

44 points | by lukas9 6 hours ago

8 comments

  • ohadkr 4 hours ago
    The no-account and on-device location approach feels exactly right for this kind of app; how often is the orbital data refreshed?
    • lukas9 32 minutes ago
      The data is refreshed every 2 hours. I have a GitHub action set up to download the data and push it to my Cloudflare Worker.
  • bagels 1 hour ago
    Awesome. This is a side project I never got around to making myself. For all the questions of "How do you know where the satellites are", there are published TLEs (old punchcard format) that describe orbital parameters, and you can use those to estimate the position within ~10km (good enough for this).

    https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/

  • mattlondon 37 minutes ago
    Appears to be iPhone only? Title needs updating
  • nefarious_ends 25 minutes ago
    The App Store says this app is 4+ years old. Sad that I can’t try the 3D view without paying but I think it’s interesting the Pro plan includes “20x the AI chat”. Oh my iPhone is VERY hot now, I better uninstall this app… good luck!
    • lukas9 6 minutes ago
      Did you possibly misread the App Store page? The app's age rating is 4+, not its age. I published it on the App Store less than a month ago. Also, is there a specific functionality you were using when your device started overheating, and have you tried changing the performance settings in the app?
  • Aachen 1 hour ago
    How does it differ from the existing apps that do this?
    • lukas9 9 minutes ago
      The reason why I even made this app is that all the similar apps I tried didn't have enough data about the satellites, or just didn't present them in a clean and interesting way. So what I tried to do with my app is to give users multiple options of displaying the satellite positions (AR, 2D, 3D) and have as much data as I could gather for each satellite.
  • adrienfr31 3 hours ago
    How do you calculate the next passes over a given position?
    • root-parent 2 hours ago
      They dont ...Vibe coded...
      • kordlessagain 1 hour ago
        Human slop comment.

        If the app does what it advertises, there is ZERO reason to care about how it was created. We aren't talking about a one shot prompt here. I'm sure they spent a lot of time working on it, regardless of how the code got generated.

        I figure most people that comment this way actually have difficulty getting a coding agent actually on track and building something useful. Just because you lack that skill, doesn't mean others don't have it.

        Regardless, a low effort comment by a human is worth a lot less than a comment from an AI with some thought behind it from a human.

        I build from a lot of reference code I wrote myself. I've been coding for 40 (oh shit - I'm old and can't do math) years, so I have a LOT of code. The improvements to this code by the agents is staggering. That's my experience. Doesn't have to be yours.

        • lukas9 14 minutes ago
          The other guy is not wrong... kinda. I used AI for the code because I have no experience with Swift and SwiftUI, but I do understand how the calculations work, because I designed them. CelesTrack gives me TLE data, precisely describing each satellite's orbit and movement, as well as its current position on the orbit. What my app does is simply simulate the satellite's position (in 30-second intervals) up until 2 or 7 days into the future, and checks whether the satellite is overhead on each interval. Satellites are considered overhead based on just one criterion, and that is that they are above your horizon (so an elevation > 0 degrees). Hope that answers your question.
  • oivaksef 2 hours ago
    where do you get satellite orbits from?
    • lukas9 31 minutes ago
      All the data comes from CelesTrack
  • vladsiu 3 hours ago
    [dead]