Sky Sentinel v0.3.3 — the orbital shells, made visible · LIVE Starlink, live debris, live space weather

Building the orbital shells…

drag to rotate · scroll to zoom

🛰 Starlink Live

0 of — active

real TLE · SGP4 · updates 10s

objects shown: —

view altitude: —

🚀 Last 10 launches

Fetching Launch Library…

🔍 Find an Object

Or just click any point on the globe.

🛰️ Selected Object

Click an object on the globe, or search by name.

☀️ Space Weather

Loading NOAA Space Weather feed…

📡 Live Catalog

Tap above to fetch the last-30-days launch group from CelesTrak and propagate each object's true position in real time via SGP4. Rendered as a separate live cloud alongside the curated teaching set.
If CelesTrak rate-limits the request (HTTP 403/429), the button shows a friendly inline message — wait a minute and retry.

What is Sky Sentinel? · v0.3.3 notes →

🛰️ Sky Sentinel v0.3.3

The orbital shells we filled, made visible. Now with real-time SGP4 propagation for two layers and click-to-identify on every dot.

Sky Sentinel is a rotatable 3D Earth that shows the regions of space humans have filled with hardware — working satellites, spent rocket bodies, the Starlink cloud, and the debris left from sixty years of launches and a few notable collisions. Built to teach, not to alarm. Spin the planet, toggle an orbital shell, drop the live Starlink constellation onto it, click any object to learn what it is and how it got there.

Sister tool to Space Pulse — Space Pulse tracks the launches; Sky Sentinel shows what those launches leave behind. Launches create the shells.

The three orbital shells

LEO — Low Earth Orbit (160–2,000 km). The crowded one. The ISS, Hubble, Starlink, most Earth-observation satellites, and the overwhelming majority of tracked debris. Objects here circle Earth in about 90 minutes.

MEO — Medium Earth Orbit (2,000–35,000 km). The quiet middle. Mostly navigation constellations — GPS, Galileo, GLONASS — at around 20,000 km.

GEO — Geostationary (35,786 km). The thin ring. Satellites here orbit at the same rate Earth turns, so they appear to hover over one spot — weather and communications satellites.

What's in v0.3.3 (real, not representative)

Rotatable 3D Earth (Three.js), drag to rotate, scroll to zoom — same as v0.1

Starlink Live — toggle in the top bar pulls real TLE from the CelesTrak starlink group, samples ~750 of the ~10,000+ active satellites, propagates true positions via SGP4 every 10 seconds, renders as an orange Points cloud. Toggle on and the LEO/MEO/GEO shells auto-hide so you see only Starlink.

Starlink "last 14 days" overlay — three-state cycle inside the Starlink Live overlay: off / overlay / only. Filters by TLE epoch to show just the recently-launched batches that haven't dispersed yet — these render as the bright yellow chains, the "Starlink trains" visible in the sky after a launch.

Load Live Debris from CelesTrak — button in the right panel pulls the last-30-days group, parses TLE, propagates each via SGP4, renders as a green Points cloud alongside the curated set. Click again to clear.

Click any dot — curated or live — to identify it. Curated objects show their pre-written story. Live objects show name (e.g. STARLINK-30123), NORAD ID, computed altitude/inclination/orbital period, and the SGP4 derivation source. (One soft edge: clicks on the yellow recent-overlay show a generic "Starlink (recent batch)" label — per-satellite naming for that overlay is a v0.3.4 follow-up.)

Curated teaching dataset (the ISS, Hubble, GPS, GEO weather sats, plus representative fragments from the 2007 Fengyun-1C ASAT test and the 2009 Cosmos 2251 / Iridium 33 collision) — still baked in, still clickable, still the entry point if you've never opened a sat-tracking tool before.

Toggle orbital shells and object types to isolate what you want to study.

NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center feed — current geomagnetic K-index from SWPC. Dual-endpoint fallback + retry button if NOAA throttles.

Top-bar suite navigation — full SnapBasin LLC sister-tools strip (SnapBasin · Watershed Pulse · Quake Sim · Space Pulse · Sky Sentinel · Quantum Pulse) + OPA cross-link.

What's still NOT in v0.3.3 (honest)

The full 25,000+ object catalog rendered at once. Even SGP4 propagation of every tracked object every animation frame would freeze a phone. We render samples (~750 Starlink, ~400 recent CelesTrak debris) and say so. This is a deliberate honesty choice, not a limitation hidden.

Conjunction / collision prediction. Computing close-approach risk between objects is real engineering — slated for v0.4, not faked here.

Per-satellite naming on the yellow recent-overlay. Clicks identify it as "recent batch" rather than the specific Starlink. Parallel-array tracking patch coming in v0.3.4.

Gamma-ray bursts. Deliberately deferred. GRBs happen on the deep-sky celestial sphere — a different coordinate system — so they belong in a future "look outward" mode, not bolted onto an Earth-centered tool.

How rate-limiting works (important context)

All the live data — Starlink TLE, debris TLE, space weather — comes from public federal/academic APIs (CelesTrak, NOAA SWPC) that throttle by IP address. If you see a friendly "rate-limited (HTTP 429)" or "retry" message, it means your browser hit the per-IP cap. Wait 5–15 minutes and the API lets you back in. Other visitors to this site from other IPs will still be working normally — there's no shared backend, so there's no shared rate limit.

Data sources

CelesTrak — orbital element catalog (celestrak.org). Two groups in use: starlink (live constellation) and last-30-days (recent launches/debris).

satellite.js v5 — SGP4 propagator. Same orbital math NASA Goddard uses for ISS tracking.

NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center — Kp index (services.swpc.noaa.gov), dual-endpoint fallback.

Curated teaching dataset — compiled from public catalog data; famous-event fragments are representative scatter, not the literal tracked pieces.

Earth texture — procedurally shaded in-browser (no external image dependency).

Version history (short)

v0.3.3 (2026-05-25) — Starlink Live SGP4 cloud + 14-day overlay · Load-live debris promoted from representative to real SGP4 · Points-cloud click identification · Space Weather dual-endpoint + retry · header rework w/ full sister-tools strip · graceful 429/403 messaging across all fetches.

v0.3 (2026-05-16) — pill-toggle UI, cursor fix, three-shell layout solidified.

v0.1 (2026-02) — initial release: curated dataset, rotatable Earth, shell toggles, click-to-identify on curated objects.

Built by Travis Jenkins / User Zero 🦄 · SnapBasin LLC · February 2026 → May 2026
Static HTML. No backend. No tracking. No user data stored. Educational/observational use. Not affiliated with NASA, NOAA, CelesTrak, SpaceX, or any space agency. The debris problem shown here is real, but the tone is deliberately instrument-calm: this is a tool for understanding, not a scare.

🚀 Last 10 launches ✕