SatNOGS Optical adds optical observations to the SatNOGS family. Where SatNOGS Network listens to satellites on radio, SatNOGS Optical watches them: fixed cameras stare at a patch of night sky, record the trails satellites and debris leave against the stars, and turn them into timed astrometric measurements anyone can use for identification and orbit determination.
How a station works
A station is a camera, a lens and a Raspberry Pi pointed at the sky — low-cost, with no licence and no prior expertise needed. Operators flash the SatNOGS Optical image from Raspberry Pi Imager, put the station outside and claim it on optical.satnogs.org with the same LSF account used for SatNOGS Network and DB. From then on it runs unattended: it waits for dark, observes, and uploads its measurements.
Each frame is a stack of 100 sub-exposures of 0.1 s, so a passing satellite draws a dashed trail. Every dash is one timed sample, and the station uploads a right ascension, a declination and an uncertainty per dash — measurements, not video. Position and time come from the station’s GNSS receiver, and the station refuses to record a measurement it cannot timestamp.
What LSF does
LSF develops and operates the full SatNOGS Optical stack in the open: the station software, the SD-card image operators flash, and the network service behind optical.satnogs.org. The network ingests measurements, correlates them against catalogue element sets, computes angles-only initial orbits and publishes the results. Identification is done centrally and versioned, so tracks can be re-correlated as better elements arrive. Objects that match nothing in the catalogue go to a public discovery queue of unknown targets.
Open data
Every measurement is published under CC BY-SA 4.0, credited to SatNOGS Optical contributors, with no keys and no gates. Nightly dumps are available in IOD, Parquet and CCSDS TDM v2 formats, and measurements are immutable once published.
Where we’re going
Grow from a handful of stations to thousands of fixed staring stations producing millions of astrometric measurements per night, giving the community an independent, open source of optical tracking data for Space Situational Awareness alongside SIDLOC and SatNOGS radio observations.
Where the project stands
SatNOGS Optical 2.0 has been live on optical.satnogs.org since August 2026. As of October 2026 the network has published more than 2.7 million measurements across 48 nights, with 11 stations registered.
Milestones
- 2022 — SatNOGS Optical starts as an early-stage effort building on Cees Bassa’s open-source stvid software
- 2024–2025 — low-cost optical orbit determination based on stvid runs as a sub-activity of the Optical MakerSpace; a prototype station validates the approach
- 2026-08 — SatNOGS Optical 2.0: station software, SD-card image and network service rebuilt from scratch
- 2026-08-23 — first measurements published on optical.satnogs.org
- 2026-10 — more than 2.7 million measurements published as open data
Links
License
Station software and network service: AGPL-3.0; planning, schemas and specifications: Apache-2.0; measurements: CC BY-SA 4.0