A few things have been added in the last couple of days I should probably explain them here as a way to get used to dev.to posting.
Selection of satellites
With 8000 something starlink satellites in the visualiser (or many more if all satellites are loaded) it became quite frustrating to select and unselect individual ones by point and click or touch. To make this easer there is now a widget that keeps the recent selections in a stack. This widget allows
- clicking the item to zoom the camera to it
- clicking the information symbol to open the larger panel of detail that USED to open
- clicking the x to un-select that satellite
- clicking to unselect all of them. Oh also you can move that little widget around using the grab handle in the left corner:
Copy/pasting TLEs
I get good suggestions via Feedback but if you don't leave your email I can't say it's implemented. From the satellite information panel you can now click the button to copy the TLE into your clipboard
Faster on slow connections
Using the network test tab of chrome with "simulate slow connection" it became clear that some textures were making the boot-up pretty unbearable in that scenario (for example, mobile + 3g). Worse, the largest textures are optional: for example, the background universe texture, or the detailed country borders. Now these textures are not loaded if the connection is detected to be slow. The time to load with no constellation selected is dramatically faster and even though loading "all of starlink" involves quite a bit of data, it is now bearable. Since this website is a SPA (single page app), the loading is one time. There is more work I need to do in this area.
Deep linking
I'm trying to build out the deep linking in order to go straight to a feature. For example:
- https://satellitemap.space/constellation/kuiper
- https://satellitemap.space/altitude-history?norad=25544 There might still be bugs with deep links and/or the browser back button.
Some random new-ish features:
Altitude history
After loading a constellation, you can go to Functions .. Timeline and this shows some tabs including growth (the default), launches and so on. In the Launches tab, the groups of satellites are now clickable :
and this goes straight to the altitude-history URL which ...
... plots their mean altitude all on a little graph.
Constellation altitude slots
Another interesting tab displays how the satellites in a constellation are grouped by altitude, with this year being compared to previous years.
You can see the bump at 360km for the 'direct to caller' starlink hardware in 2025 that was not there a year ago.
Re-entry view
This is an old feature but had bugs, now it doesn't have bugs. This screenshot shows the "exploded" view of the starlink constellation (the button with the blue box with exploding sides has been pressed) plus the "Re-entry risk" filter with everything de-selected except <180km. If you look carefully to the middle right of the globe you can see two red starlink satellites that are about to meet a fiery end.
Top comments (1)
Great job on this! Excited to keep up with your progress. A lot of upgrades on this version over the classic one - I’ve already been taking notes on things you do better than me, and it’s a pretty solid list. Well done!