Credits and licenses

Satelog stands on public data and open work by others. This page lists every source, what we use it for, and the license it comes with.

Orbits and catalog

CelesTrak publishes the orbital elements (GP data) and the satellite catalog (SATCAT) that Satelog shows. The underlying tracking data comes from the U.S. Space Force. Positions are computed in your browser with the standard SGP4 model through the open-source satellite.js library. Our own data service only keeps a copy of the CelesTrak files to serve them quickly and respect their rate limits.

Earth and Moon imagery

• Sentinel-2 cloudless, 2016–2017 layer (default). EOxCloudless 2016 by EOX IT Services GmbH (Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016 & 2017). License: CC BY 4.0. We resize and tile the images for display.
• Sentinel-2 cloudless, 2025 layer (sharp option). EOxCloudless 2025 by EOX IT Services GmbH (Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2025). License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which allows non-commercial use only.
• Blue Marble, Black Marble (night lights) and the Moon. NASA Blue Marble and VIIRS Black Marble via NASA GIBS, and LRO WAC mosaic via NASA Moon Trek. NASA imagery is free to use with credit. We acknowledge the use of imagery provided by services from NASA’s Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), part of NASA’s Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS).
• Backdrop textures. The low-resolution Earth and star background textures come from the examples of the open-source three-globe library and are based on NASA imagery.
• City names. Taken from Natural Earth, which is in the public domain.

Descriptions and photos

On object pages, descriptions come from Wikipedia (text under CC BY-SA 4.0) and structured facts from Wikidata (public domain, CC0). Photos come from Wikimedia Commons and each one is credited on its page with a link to the original file and its license. Our icons and illustrations are our own.

Software

Satelog is built with React, three.js, satellite.js, tz-lookup and the Inter typeface (SIL Open Font License) and the flag-icons flag set (MIT license). All of them are open source. Thank you to the people who maintain them.

Our logo

You may use the Satelog logo to link to this site. Files and rules are on the logo page.

Spotted a mistake?

If a credit is missing or wrong, please tell us on Instagram @satel.log and we will fix it.