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Comment by netfire | Hacker News Reader

Curious how they are tracking the rocket's descent to catch it on camera. It seems like they lose visual of the rocket and then are able to re-acquire it fairly quickly. Are they using some sort of infrared or other tracking beacon on the rocket that the camera can follow or using trajectory data to determine where the camera should be pointed?

Also, I'd love to know when these launches are going to happen further in advance. The Launch Manifest page just shows the next launch as happening in June[1]. Is there a better place to get more exact planned launch dates further in advance?

[1] http://www.spacex.com/missions

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Probably Radar based tracking with the possible add-on of multiple visual angles being able to communicate with each other. If you are interested in some further reading, here are some interesting articles/videos:

Shuttle launch imagery from land, air and water - http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/167722main_LaunchImagery06.pdf

Software to control a telescope (with sample videos) - http://www.optictracker.com/Home.html

Description of NASA's setup - http://photo.net/casual-conversations-forum/00cv5p

PDF of L3's system which provides a great overview - http://www2.l-3com.com/ios/pdf/L-3%20Brashear%20Capabilities...

Thanks for the links! I'll try to look at those when I have some time. On a quick glance, it looks like most of those systems are ground based and pretty large (which works great for launch footage), the video posted appears to be looking down on the landing pad at the end, which leads me to believe the camera is located on a helicopter.

Could a radar based camera be mounted on a helicopter, or could land-based tracking devices work in conjunction with a helicopter mounted camera to achieve the tracking?

You can have their launches show up in your calendar automatically, add this to your Google Calendar for instance: http://spacexstats.com/calendar.php?launch=all

With the tiny embedded viewer, I also lost track, but on full screen, I was able to (barely) keep track of the rocket the entire time. I also assume they have a pre-computed flight path that's pretty accurate, maybe GPS on the vehicle and undoubtedly some radar tracking. In short, I can't imagine them not knowing precisely where that rocket is the entire time.

Unless something goes wrong. Well, several things.

I was wondering the same thing. To me, the camera work looks very confident (smooth, even panning). Almost as if they knew exactly where the rocket was behind the clouds. Infrared sounds plausible. Or maybe they just have an high-res camera that captures a large portion of the sky. Some student would then post process the video by zooming in and panning accordingly.

If you know where the rocket is and where you are, it's pretty easy to calculate where to point the camera.

But the hard part is knowing where the rocket is, right?

Radar.

or telemetry.

I would assume they use the same radar tracking cameras that NASA does.

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