🪽 Hermes Watch

A native Rust desktop satellite monitor — Hermes, messenger of the gods, now watching the heavens for you.

中文文档

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In Greek mythology, Hermes — winged sandals, winged cap — is the swift messenger of the gods, patron of travelers and the skies. Hermes Watch gives that role to your desktop: it fetches live two-line element (TLE) sets from public catalogs, propagates every orbit with SGP4, and renders the whole constellation in real time.

3D globe pane — live SGP4 orbit on a textured Earth

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✨ Features

• 🌐 Live catalogs — pulls TLEs from Celestrak on startup (~18 000 objects across 6 groups) and auto-refreshes every 2 hours
• 🛰 SGP4 propagation — full SGP4/SDP4 model, TEME → geodetic conversion, sub-satellite points and ground tracks (past 45 min → future 90 min), true inertial (ECI) orbit ellipses
• 🖥 Native UI — egui/eframe with the glow renderer; no web stack, no Electron. GPU-textured rotating Earth with day/night terminator
• 🪟 Split panes — 1 / 2H / 2V / 4 independent viewports, each with its own camera and selected satellite
• 🔍 Catalog sidebar — a light panel with full-width clickable rows: full-text filter (name / NORAD id) + a color-coded category dropdown (All · Station · Weather · Navigation · Science · Comms · Military · Debris · Other), each entry showing its object count. Row names are black; satellites whose elements cannot be propagated are red. Left click points the current pane at that row; right click opens a row menu — Add <name> to Window N (retargets that pane, replacing whatever it tracked, and flashes a short white Added … notice in the pane's top-left for a few seconds) plus Copy NORAD id / Copy TLE.
• 🗺 Four view types — 3D Globe · World Map · Ground Track · Detail — switchable independently per pane

🗺 Views

Each pane can independently render one of four views:

View	What you see
3D Globe	GPU-textured rotating Earth with day/night terminator, satellite markers in 3D space and the full ECI orbit ellipse of the selected satellite. Drag to orbit the camera, scroll to zoom.
World Map	2D equirectangular map with all catalog satellites at their current sub-satellite points, color-coded by group.
Ground Track	The selected satellite's ground track — past 45 minutes (fading) → future 90 minutes — plus sub-satellite point and footprint circle.
Detail	Live orbital elements of the selected satellite: lat/lon/alt, velocity, period, inclination, epoch age, and TLE text.

🪟 Split Layout

Use the toolbar to switch the workspace between:

• 1 — single full-area viewport
• 2H / 2V — two panes side by side / stacked
• 4 — quadrant layout

Every pane keeps its own view type, camera state and target satellite, so you can watch, e.g., the globe in one pane and the ground track in another simultaneously.

🚀 Build & Run

cargo run --release

Requires a stable Rust toolchain (MSVC target on Windows). First build takes a few minutes; subsequent incremental builds are fast.

Tests

# Whole suite — library + binary targets
cargo test

# Library target only
cargo test --lib

cargo test covers both targets. src/lib.rs declares the ui module, so cargo test --lib also builds and runs the UI tests (src/ui/views/globe3d_tests.rs). Without that declaration the UI tests would exist only in the binary target and --lib would print a passing result while silently skipping every one of them.

First launch

On startup the app immediately fetches all 6 Celestrak groups in parallel. While fetching, the status bar shows progress (sources done / total, object count). If a source fails (network blocked, timeout), the error is shown in the status bar and the remaining sources still load.

Network notes

• Requests go to celestrak.org with a browser-like User-Agent (bare clients get HTTP 403).
• An HTTP(S) proxy can be configured in the toolbar settings dialog; changes take effect on the next refresh. The SAT_PROXY environment variable (e.g. SAT_PROXY=http://127.0.0.1:7890) is used as a fallback when no proxy is set in the UI.

🏛 Architecture

┌─────────────┐    mpsc channel     ┌──────────────┐
│  tokio RT   │ ──────────────────▶ │   egui App   │
│  fetch svc  │   FetchMsg::Done    │  (UI thread) │
└──────┬──────┘                     └──────┬───────┘
       │ HTTP (Celestrak)                  │ reads
       ▼                                   ▼
  TLE text parse            Arc<RwLock<catalog>> / Arc<RwLock<status>>
                                             │
                                             ▼
                                    SGP4 propagate per frame
                                    (orbit.rs, cached)

• main.rs — builds a 4-worker tokio runtime, shared Arc<RwLock> state, launches eframe.
• data/fetch/ — source list (6 Celestrak endpoints) + TLE parsing; FetchConfig carries the optional proxy.
• service.rs — spawns one task per source; each completed source is sent to the UI as a FetchMsg and merged into the catalog.
• orbit.rs — SGP4 wrapper: propagates TEME state vectors, converts to geodetic lat/lon/alt, generates ground tracks and ECI orbit polylines (results cached per epoch to keep the UI at 60 fps).
• ui/ — app.rs owns state, toolbar, sidebar and split layout; panes.rs draws pane chrome; views/ implements the four renderers.

📁 Project Layout

src/
├── main.rs            entry point: async runtime + eframe launch
├── data/
│   ├── model.rs       Sat / SatGroup types, TLE structs
│   └── fetch/         Celestrak sources, HTTP client, TLE parsing
├── orbit.rs           SGP4 propagation, TEME → geodetic conversion
├── service.rs         background fetch service (tokio)
└── ui/
    ├── app.rs         application state, toolbar, sidebar, split layout
    ├── panes.rs       pane layout & chrome
    └── views/
        ├── globe3d.rs       3D textured globe (+ tests)
        ├── world_map.rs     2D equirectangular map
        ├── ground_track.rs  ground track renderer
        ├── detail.rs        orbital element inspector
        └── catalog.rs       sidebar list & filter

🔧 Troubleshooting

Symptom	Likely cause / fix
Source errors in status bar, few or no satellites	Celestrak unreachable from your network — set a proxy in the toolbar settings (or SAT_PROXY) and refresh
HTTP 403 in errors	Client blocked — the app already sends a browser UA; a proxy may still be needed
Empty globe/map but catalog sidebar populated	Propagation epoch too old — wait for the next 2 h auto-refresh and pick a satellite with a recent epoch
Build fails on Linux	Install X11/Wayland dev packages (eframe x11/wayland features)

📜 License

MIT