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I need to generate a list of which satellites were in view at a given date/time. I'm specifically interested in the Galileo constellation of GNSS satellites, and I'd like to get a list of when each satellite rises above 5° elevation at my location, culminates, and sets below 5°. I'd like to be able to generate this list for a given start date/time for a specified number of hours, typically 12 or 24 hours.

I've looked at sites like Celestrak, Trimble GNSS PLanning and even In-The-Sky.org, all of which get infuriatingly close to what I need but are not quite able to produce rise/culmination/set times in a usable form.

I think I can get this information "long hand" by using a program like Stellarium and observing each satellite over the time window of interest, however that will be quite a long and repetitive process which may be error-prone and I may have to repeat it many times.

From discussions I've had with work colleagues, I feel sure there must be a resource for generating this type of data, but I can't seem to find any. Anyone happen to know of such a resource, or suggest a more efficient way to generate the data I need?

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I would access the TLEs of the Galileo satellites and then use SGP4 to propagate them: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/45618/accuracy-of-converting-from-tle-orbital-elements-to-cartesian-if-used-for-other#:~:text=You%20can%20download%20SGP4%20from%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.space-track.org%2Fdocumentation%23%2Fsgp4%20and%20use,you%20can%20do%20whatever%20you%20want%20with%20them.

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  • $\begingroup$ SGP4 will in fact make you a file containing their latitude, longitude, and altitude, at a long list of times, which you can easily use to compute elevation angle. $\endgroup$
    – Ryan C
    Jun 15 at 23:43

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