New Satellite Tracking Application Released

Bob McGwier, N4HY, has announced the release of a new satellite tracking application entitled Visible Ephemeris.

Visible Ephemeris is a modern, spiritual successor to Quiktrak (1986), re-engineered for the Raspberry Pi 5 and modern silicon. It is capable of propagating 13,000+ satellites in real-time with sub-second updates while maintaining <5% CPU utilisation. Visible Ephemeris is high performance physics-based program using Kelso/Villado SGP4 to track satellites (all in the Celestrak TLE). It uses McGwier’s implementation of Pedro Escobal AOS/LOS search, but rewritten for altitude and not Eccentric Anomaly. The code is designed for and intended for the Raspberry Pi and displays graphics components using Web UI.

It features a Hybrid Decoupled Architecture where the UI, Orbital Mechanics, and Network Services run on independent threads, ensuring the interface never freezes—even during heavy calculation loads.

Visible Ephemeris has been released under the MIT license and further details can be found at https://github.com/n4hy/VisibleEphemerisCPP.git