Vector tiles with tippecanoe and MBTiles

The TLE catalog has 10,000+ active objects. Plotting them all as GeoJSON in a browser brings any vector renderer to its knees — every feature must be loaded, parsed, indexed, and drawn. Vector tiles solve this elegantly: instead of one giant GeoJSON, you generate a pre-indexed pyramid of small tiles, each containing only the features visible at that zoom and location.

The vector tile pyramid

A vector tile is a Protocol Buffers (PBF) file containing a subset of features for a specific (z, x, y) tile address. The pyramid follows the standard slippy-tile convention: z=0 is the entire world in one tile, z=1 splits it into 4 tiles, z=2 into 16, and so on. At z=10, the world is 1,048,576 tiles. Each tile is small (typically 5–50 KB) and the renderer fetches only the tiles in the current viewport.

tippecanoe

tippecanoe (now MIT-licensed at github.com/felt/tippecanoe) is the industry-standard generator: it takes a GeoJSON and produces an MBTiles or PMTiles archive. It's a C++ tool you install via Homebrew (brew install tippecanoe) or build from source.

tippecanoe \
  -o satellites.pmtiles \
  --maximum-zoom=10 \
  --minimum-zoom=0 \
  --layer=satellites \
  --drop-densest-as-needed \
  --extend-zooms-if-still-dropping \
  satellites.geojson

The key flags:

• --minimum-zoom / --maximum-zoom — what zoom range to generate. Generate fewer zooms when your features don't need them.
• --drop-densest-as-needed — at low zooms, drop the densest features to keep tile size manageable. Essential for large catalogs.
• --extend-zooms-if-still-dropping — if you're still dropping features at the max zoom, automatically extend.
• --layer — the layer name inside the tiles. Use it for styling later.

MBTiles vs PMTiles

MBTiles is the original spec: a SQLite database file containing every tile in the pyramid. Easy to generate, easy to serve via a tile server (martin, TiTiler, mbtileserver), but requires running infrastructure.

PMTiles is the modern improvement: a single file with an internal index that lets HTTP range requests fetch individual tiles directly. No tile server needed — just upload the PMTiles file to S3 (or any HTTP host) and configure the renderer to range-request from the URL. This is the modern default for static deployments.

// MapLibre with PMTiles
const protocol = new pmtiles.Protocol();
maplibregl.addProtocol("pmtiles", protocol.tile);

map.addSource('satellites', {
  type: 'vector',
  url: 'pmtiles://https://my-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/satellites.pmtiles'
});

Tile size optimization

Aim for tiles to be 50 KB or smaller. If a tile is too large, MapLibre's frame rate drops. Strategies:

• Lower max zoom — at z=10, each tile covers ~40 km on a side; rarely do you need higher resolution for satellite data.
• Drop attributes — every feature can have N properties; if you don't render them, drop them with --include filters in tippecanoe.
• Simplify geometries — for lines and polygons, set --simplification to reduce vertex count.

The lab

You'll download the active CelesTrak satellite catalog (10,000+ TLEs), compute current sub-satellite points for all of them with skyfield, export as GeoJSON, generate vector tiles with tippecanoe across zoom levels 0–10, serve via PMTiles directly from local file system, and render in MapLibre. The result is a smooth, pannable map of every satellite in orbit — at 60 fps even on a 5-year-old laptop.

This is the architecture LaunchDetect uses for the /atlas/ page's spaceport layer (smaller catalog but same pipeline). PMTiles + S3 + CloudFront = no tile server to maintain.