Tracking objects

Posted by: @zander

Posted by: @frogandtoad

Posted by: @zander

@frogandtoad I think you may be onto something there as there has been a jkid in the news doinng something similar to track Elon Musk, and then the oligarchs.

Screw Elon musk!

@frogandtoad That's telling

Telling of what exactly?
That you you believe everything that comes out of his mouth?

Poor you!

@sky-king

Posted by: @sky-king

Thanks for the inputs..

I am talking about planes at or about 15K-20K with a 10+ mile slant range, As   far as speed of the mount goes, I have a Meade ETX that will track a satellite passing overhead at a much faster pace the the planes of interest,  also I have taken photos at 50x with it with no mount induced blurring. I have actually been able to track using the remote control to move the mount manually for a short period. so I think I can handle the mount part.

Problem I see is the software and getting the image to a board for processing.

A long ways to go,,just something I want to do in the future

IMO, I think what you want to do is actually achievable, provided you can get some relevant data.

As long as you are using a good camera (with suitable focus for your desired distance), then you should be able to use the OpenCV library (works with C++, python, etc...) to track the object in real time (it has a bunch of tracking and recognition algorithms built in), given that you can also obtain the flight data to reasonably accurate object coordinates.

Cheers