Keeping an eye on the sky

Click here for the legacy pages of the discontinued SatSpy software for Windows

The SatSpy.com story

Between 1995 and 2001, SatSpy was a computer program that made it easier for people to observe satellites crossing the night sky. It did this by offering a graphical interface and mathematical calculations of the orbits with the help of data provided by public or private stakeholders.
In 2001, the rights holder and creator of SatSpy, Dave Capelluci, decided to stop updating the product and ended its development. The decision was personal, partly due to the success of SatSpy, which became popular enough for crackers to bypass the limitations and provide cracked copies and serial numbers, thus reducing the creator's income.
In those six years, five versions of the SatSpy software brought together a small community of satellite observers. They became part of a larger history that is still written long after. In the last period of publishing, one kid from Eastern Europe discovered it and used it to start on a path to deepen his understanding of celestial mechanics and the space industry. Acappella Publishing ceased the publication of SatSpy in 2001, and a cyber squatter acquired the satspy.com domain soon after. Fast forward some years later, and the kid from Eastern Europe grew up and took a position where knowledge about satellites and space was part of the job description. When the European Union first regulated an independent capacity to track space objects, the former user of SatSpy had input for the decision-making proces.
The landscape of software and websites that can provide the same general functionality as SatSpy is now much more diverse, and their capabilities have evolved. Still, this website is about more than just a computer program. Many years after the domain was cyber squatted, it was reacquired by the one who never forgot how consequential it was in its career development; the old website was dug out from the Internet's memory, and all the pages are now accessible in the original format HERE allowing users to experience what it was like to use SatSpy back in the day.