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Tracking the international space station with an Arduino
A collection of Farid's notes
After chatting with my friend Trevor at Plateau Astro, I figured I could hack the IR turret into something that points at the ISS at all times. The algorithm takes into account a bunch of things like the earth’s non-spherical gravitational field, the atmospheric drag, and the gravity of the moon and the sun. Passing the initial conditions from the TLE through the SGP4 algorithm, we end up with a position based on Earth-Centered Inertial(ECI) coordinates, which is a plane fixed in relation to the stars at the time we are calculating for (the “epoch”).
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