Capture station location data when creating an Observation
Station owners can change the lat, lng, alt
fields at any time, which is a good thing.
However, when a historical observation is retrieved from the API, the current values of these fields is returned as part of the response. These may not correspond to the configured lat, lng, alt
that was used for pass prediction for the observation and for scheduling.
This can cause an issue when re-propagating the orbit from the stored TLE if the values have changed since the observation occurred. I have observed this to happen in a few cases. IIRC, the cases were all just increased precision of the lat/lng values and not the more problematic moving to a different location.
Proposal: Save the current values of lat, lng, alt
when creating an Observation
in the same manner as the TLE is saved.
Optional: save the Station.name
or Station.description
. There are few cases where Station.name
holds useful information relevant to a specific observation. A counter-example is https://network.satnogs.org/stations/91/