I'm trying to watch the Orbcomm-2 satellites evolve into a constellation. They were recently placed in orbit by SpaceX (their video here) and the details are discussed in this excellent question and answer pair.
I found a way to get latitude, longitude, and altitude by clicking on each satellite listed here (Norad 41179U through 41189U). The process was awkward - I made a series of screen shots (twenty two of them - argh!) like this, two for each satellite, and interpolated to a single point in time (14:00:00 UTC 24-DEC-2015)
In Python I converted to X, Y, Z in space,
for sat in sats:
r = r_earth + sat.alt
x = r * np.cos(rads*sat.lat) * np.cos(rads*sat.lon)
y = r * np.cos(rads*sat.lat) * np.sin(rads*sat.lon)
z = r * np.sin(rads*sat.lat)
sat.r, sat.x, sat.y, sat.z = r, x, y, z
and got this:
Those are kilometers, relative to the average of the group - just to get a rough idea what is happening. The color lines are motion over 5 seconds of time.
My question: Is there an easier way to download latitude, longitude, and altitude for all of the satellites in the constellation, possibly as a text file at a single point in time?
EDIT: There are many nice programs and packages to plot astronomical and orbital data, but this question is about getting the data now and plotting it myself.