Welcome to the StarBridge Users Guide. This guide will help to familiarize you with the StarBridge application and its uses.
Starting StarBridge
Starting StarBridge in GUI Mode
Starting StarBridge in Command-Line Mode
Using the GUI
Browsing Satellite Information
The Edit menu
The Options Dialog
The Tools Menu
Selecting Satellites
Converting Satellite Information
Check for Updates
Install Celestia Addon
StarBridge may be started in one of two modes, "GUI mode" and "command line mode".
To start StarBridge in GUI mode, run the file named starbridge.cmd in the bin/ folder of your StarBridge directory. This will start StarBridge and show you the interactive GUI, as shown below:
Once the application is loaded, you can begin to use it. Please refer to the section Using the GUI
TBD
The GUI follows accepted standards of Java Swing application design. I have divided the document into sections based upon common tasks with StarBridge.
You can open a StarBridge satellite file b selecting File -> Open in the main menu and then selecting any StarBridge satellite file. The StarBridge satellite files use the .sbsat file extension. When you open a satellite file, it will look similar to the following:
You can select the satellite that you want to browse by clicking on its name on the listbox on the left. The data fields are then filled with the satellite data. You can also edit existing satellite data, create new satellite data or delete satellite data by using the buttons on the form.
While browsing the satellite file, you can see additional data on the file by selecting File -> Properties from the main menu bar.
At the moment, there isn't much under this menu item. I will add the normal cut/copy/paste functions in the futire. For the time being this menu holds the Options dialog/
The options dialog lets you customize StarBridge. It looks like the following:
It contains the following controls:
| Control | Description |
|---|---|
| Check for Updates on Startup | As the name implies, when you run StarBridge, the application will look over the web to see if any updates are available. If they are, StarBridge will prompt you to update the application. Updating is not required. |
| Automatically download and update StarBridge | This feature is currently disabled. |
| Celestia Directory | If you are a Celestia user, you can use this field to tell StarBridge the location of your Celestia directory. You can either type in the directory yourself or press the browse button on the right of the text field to bring up a GUI to help you select the Celestia directory. |
This menu contains the bulk of the functionality of StarBridge.
The StarBirdge GUI makes it very easy to select the satellites that you want to use in other programs (namely Celestia). From the main application window select the Tools -> Select Satellites from the main menu. This will display the Select Satellites dialog, as shown below:
The Satellite Selection dialog is divided into two main sets of controls. The first is the simple By name" text box at the top of the dialog. Simply enter the name of the satellite into the text box. You can enter more than one name by placing a comma in between each name. It is important that the names that you use exactly match the names of the satellites as defined by the CelesTrak system. If you visit the CelesTrak site and select the Internation Space Station link you will see a sample of what I mean. Each satellite entry starts with its official name and is then followed by two lines of rather cryptic data. You can safely ignore the cryptic data, StarBridge will take care of that for you. The names are important though. Click on the Internation Space Station link and you can see that it contains information on three different satellites: ISS (ZARYA), ISS DEB [TOOLBAG] and 2008-059B. These are the names that StarBridge uses. If you enter a name that is mis-spelled or otherwise invalid, StarBridge will ignore it.
StarBridge now supports the use of regular expressions in the By Name field. It's beyond the cope of this document to describe regular expressions in detail, but it is worth some time explaining the basics. First off, if you just enter the entire name of the satellite in the proper case (always UPPERCASE at the time of this writing) you can simple enter the entire name of the satellite. For example, ISS DEB [TOOLBAG] will retrieve the satellite record by that name.
However, sometimes you want to select a number of satellites that have a similar name. In the screen shot above you can see that there are two regular expressions entered. The first is ^ISS which tells StarBirdge that you want to find all satellites whose names start with the letters "ISS" The second regular expression is [.]*DEB[.]*. That expression will find any satellite that has the text "DEB" in the name. Take care to note that the two expressions are separated by a comma. There is no limit to the number of expressions you may enter.
The second set of controls allow you to select satellites by group or subgroup. In the figure above, you can see that the Weather group has been selected. This means that all of the subgroups of the Weather group are also automatically selected. Whenever an entire group is selected, all of the subgroups are greyed-out.
You can also see from the figure that the Space Earth subgroup of the Science group is also selected.
All of the criteria that you specify are additive (logical OR) in nature. By that I mean that if you enter ^ISS in the By Name text box and you click on the Communications checkbox, you will get all satellites whose names begin with the letters ISS and you will also get all satellites in the Communications group.
| Regular Expression Cheat Sheet | |
|---|---|
| Example | Description |
^ISS | Find all satellites that start with the letters "ISS" |
[.]*DEB[.]* | Find all satellites whose name contains the text start "DEB" |
[)]$ | Find all satellites whose name ends with a closing parenthesis ")". |
StarBridge allows you to read satellite information from either the Two Line Element format (using the TLEAdapter) or from the native StarBridge format (using the StarBridgeAdapter). Yoou can also write satellite information out into either the native StarBridge format or the Celestia Solar System Catalog (.ssc) format, using the CelestiaAdapter
The screenshot below shows the Convert Satellite Information dialog. You can access this dialog by selecting Tools -> Convert Satellites from the main menu.
Using this dialog is pretty straight forward. You must first pick the satellite information source. For this release of StarBridge you will almost always use the TLEAdapter in the Source Adapter combobox. The TLEAdapter is able to read from any Two Line Element source information. After selecting the TLEAdapter, you will need to select the celestrak.properties file from the data/ directory within StarBridge. For now, CeleTrak is the only recognized source of TLE information.
Next you will need to select a destination for the satellite information. Begin by selecting the CelestiaAdapter as the destination adapter. Then you can use the "Browse" button to select the directory and file name into which you want to save the converted data. I recommend saving the data in to catalogs/ directory in your StarBridge installation folder. If you are creating a new file, you will need to first select the directory where you want to create the file, and then type in the filename in the Destination file field.
Optionally, you can also click on the Select Satellites button and make any changes to your satellite selection criteria. If you do not perform this step, then your existing/previous satellite selection criteria is used.
Use this command any time you want StarBridge to check for newer versions over the web. If a newer version is found, you will be prompted to download it.
This tool will install the StarBridge addon for Celestia. If you have not already defined the location of your Celestia directory on the Options dialog (see Options) you will be prompted to do so. This creates a starbridge/ folder in the Celestia extras/ folder along with the models and textures sub-folders. It also copies the starbridge.celx file into the Celestia scripts folder. You can run the script within Celestia by selecting File -> Scripts -> Update Satellites from the main menu.
Copyright © 2009 Jeff Davies. All Rights Reserved.