Molniya Orbit: Satellite Animation 🚀

A quick animation of a what it would look like being on a satellite in a Molniya Orbit, which is a highly elliptical orbit the Soviets used for communications satellites rather than geocentric, due to the high latitude of most of the Soviet Union. I believe the Russians still use these orbits. Yes, I know the Soviet Union no longer exists, but it did when they first put up these satellites.

Still to do: I need to tweak the timing on the orbit, and make it a little slower near the apogee.

I used Blender 2.66 for this, the Earth's texture images came from NASA, and the earth rendering itself is simply me following along an awesome video tutorial by Andrew Price at blenderguru.com. The star map background came from user hellstormde on deviantart.

The locations for where the camera should be came from me, doing math. I calculated the orbit positions in the perifocal frame, then converted to geocentric coordinates. 1 Blender unit = 1000 km. All equations and coordinate transformation matrices from Orbital Mechanics for Engineering Students 2nd ED by Curtis.