[HN Gopher] Show HN: Beautiful 3D ISS tracker with live video an...
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Show HN: Beautiful 3D ISS tracker with live video and near-realtime
clouds
This is a little hobby project that I hope you enjoy. You can see
where the International Space Station is now, with live HD video
from NASA, on a realistic 3D globe. The positions of the sun and
moon are also accurate, though distances aren't to scale. The
clouds are also near-realtime; I span that out into a separate
project at https://clouds.matteason.co.uk, where the cloud images I
create from EUMETSAT data are freely available. I've got more
features almost ready to go, like the ability to turn off all UI,
toggleable clouds and turning off the day/night cycle I'd love for
it to be used in education, so please do share it with any teachers
you know who would find it useful
Author : matteason
Score : 101 points
Date : 2024-04-28 11:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (iss.matteason.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (iss.matteason.co.uk)
| alberduris wrote:
| Very good looking. It'd be amazing if it has some kind of "time
| travelling" option or an easy way to know the next time the ISS
| will pass over a certain location.
| matteason wrote:
| Thanks! Yeah rewinding would be good (especially if I can get
| the video to sync up) and next pass time would be great
| zamadatix wrote:
| For some reason this causes "A problem repeatedly occurred" on my
| iPhone 15. Reminding myself to try when I get home.
| matteason wrote:
| Sorry about that - unfortunately I can't reproduce it on an
| iPad Pro and I use Android but I'll see if I can borrow an
| iPhone to test on
| pakr wrote:
| Same here
| matteason wrote:
| I don't suppose either of you have any content blockers
| installed in Safari? Someone on Reddit has mentioned that
| disabling content blockers fixed the globe not loading
| zamadatix wrote:
| I did have one but turning it off didn't change the
| behavior. It's not that the globe doesn't load it's that it
| starts loading for a split second (can actually see the
| globe), kinda fails, reloads, repeats the behavior, then
| loads the browser error page. I'm not sure if it's actually
| something you're doing wrong as much as maybe it tries to
| load too many resources and fails (iOS, and iOS Safari in
| particular, are sticklers about memory usage).
| sccxy wrote:
| Safari runs out of memory with web maps.
|
| Reported it several times but no fix from Apple.
|
| Most powerful iPhone crashes but 5 year old Samsung with 2GB
| ram works fine...
| bingaling wrote:
| zooming with mousewheel is a bit slow, takes ~10 scrolls to get
| to ~2x zoom (max)
| urza wrote:
| Wow.
|
| The video and map position appears to be a bit out of sync.
|
| Was watching flyby over USA and when the map position exited land
| and went over ocean, it took about a minute for the video to
| transition from land to ocean.
|
| Probably bc the nasa feed has delay?
| matteason wrote:
| Yeah there's definitely some latency in the video. I thought
| about adding an option to compensate for it (ie delay the
| position shown by some amount of seconds) but the delay is
| probably going to vary quite a bit over time so I don't think I
| can do that reliably
| urza wrote:
| Haha this is neat. If you zoom out and rotate the scene, you can
| position the ISS to watch it transit in front of the Moon.
| 9dev wrote:
| I don't know if it is interesting for this project, but I
| recently set up a Grafana dashboard for the telemetry feed from
| the ISS:
|
| https://github.com/Radiergummi/iss-metrics
|
| There's also data on the position and rotation of various parts
| of the station in this feed. Might make for some interesting
| options when rendering the station!
| matteason wrote:
| Ooh very interesting, thanks! I did have a little model of the
| ISS in place of the yellow dot originally but I ran into some
| issues with it. Would be very interesting to get that fixed up
| and rendering accurately too
| mthoms wrote:
| This is fantastic. Very nice work. Are you using CesiumJS?
|
| Minor gripe: Please don't disable right click :(
| matteason wrote:
| Thanks! It's not Cesium, no - I'm using Globe.GL [0] with
| custom shaders for the atmosphere effects and day/night
| transition
|
| Sorry about right-click. It's not disabled intentionally, it
| might be something in Globe.GL or three js. I'll see if I can
| enable it
|
| [0] https://globe.gl/
| spuz wrote:
| There are some crazy lightning storms over China in the live
| video feed at the moment. Very cool.
|
| One thing I would change is to change the yellow dot to an actual
| image of the ISS. It would also be cool to be able to zoom in a
| little bit more (and maybe use some higher resolution images of
| the globe).
| matteason wrote:
| It did originally have a little model of the ISS actually but I
| ran into some issues with the model loader - going to try and
| reinstate that feature
| spuz wrote:
| Looking at your real-time cloud rendering, have you
| considered trying to interpolate between the images provided
| every 3 hours by EUMETSAT? I have tried this using images
| from DISCOVR but I'm not totally happy with the result. I
| wonder if you or anyone else might have some ideas to get
| more realistic movement between the clouds inbetween each 3
| hour interval?
|
| https://github.com/alexspurling/earthflow
| matteason wrote:
| I've wanted to do it but didn't really know where to start,
| so I'm very interested to hear if anyone has any pointers.
| I'll have a look at your project too
| nullhole wrote:
| That makes me think: adding a live lighting map / lightning
| locations would be neat, since that is the kind of thing you
| can see from the video feed.
|
| There's a couple crowdsourced lighting status websites out
| there, might be possible to use the same data feed...
| matteason wrote:
| That's a brilliant idea - looks like
| https://www.blitzortung.org allows their data to be used in
| non commercial projects so I'll look into that
| pimlottc wrote:
| This is neat, loading time was very slow for me, though. The
| Earth didn't appear for 30+ seconds, so most of the page was just
| a black background.
| matteason wrote:
| Thanks, I'll see if I can improve that. The textures are quite
| hefty so that's probably slowing it down. Are you on a
| mobile/cellular data connection?
| pimlottc wrote:
| Nope, home wifi, Firefox, M1 mac mini
| sebosp wrote:
| Can you think of a way to use your live cloud data as the
| background shader for https://github.com/sebosp/chartacritty ? I
| was also hoping to draw the iss progression through the earth,
| but sometimes people use terminals to actually read and may
| become confusing... For the rewind functionality you could look
| into rerun.io, not sure it's compatible with your current
| libraries but may be fun
| matteason wrote:
| There's a composite image with the clouds and earth at
| https://clouds.matteason.co.uk/images/8192x4096/earth.jpg that
| you might be able to use?
| sebosp wrote:
| Awesome, maybe some negative effect over it, how often does
| it refresh?
| matteason wrote:
| The source data it uses refreshes every 3 hours but it runs
| more frequently because the timing of the refresh isn't
| guaranteed. If you configure your app to refresh every 30
| minutes - 1 hour that's probably good enough.
| badcppdev wrote:
| I love it!
|
| My feature request is an option for a circle on the ground
| showing where the ISS is visible from at the moment.
| mncharity wrote:
| Fwiw, there's also a set of monthly Blue Marble Next
| Generation[1] (2004), similar to the single Blue Marble (2002)
| used by clouds.matteason.co.uk. Snow cover is quite visible[2] -
| perhaps undesirable for a "are there clouds there?" ISS
| application, but nicer for a "loosely approximate Earth
| appearance". I used it years ago for an Earth seasons interactive
| - perhaps there's some way to get actual snow cover these days,
| rather than echoing 2004's snow? And more realistic ocean color?
|
| [1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/BlueMarble
| https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/search?q=blue+marble+next+gene...
| [2] Jan https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/images/73938/january-blue-
| marb... vs June https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/images/76487/june-
| blue-marble-...
| matteason wrote:
| I do actually use monthly snow/ice cover images in both
| projects! They're in the repo for the live clouds service [0].
|
| I created them using the monthly images you linked combined
| with the Blue Marble "Land Surface, Ocean Color and Sea Ice"
| image [1]
|
| [0] https://github.com/matteason/live-cloud-
| maps/tree/main/stati...
|
| [1] https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/images/57730/the-blue-
| marble-l...
| mncharity wrote:
| Ah, nice. A quick thought: Perhaps have an option of seeing a
| projected track, perhaps with time ticks, for "oh, it's going
| to overfly mumble in mumble time - I should stay/try to come
| back then"?
| nx1 wrote:
| This is awesome, I work in Astronomy and what would be really
| cool is if you could get different space observatories on here
| with what they were observing, I know that's no small task but I
| could probably get you telemetry data for atleast a few :)
| matteason wrote:
| Definitely interested in adding more if you have any pointers
| for where to get interesting data!
| Simorgh wrote:
| Not sure if you've heard of Privateer, which generates a viz.
| of all satellites functional or otherwise. It's in a similar
| vein.
|
| https://wayfinder.privateer.com/
| jsemrau wrote:
| Wow. This is really beautiful? Can the code be customized to
| other spacecraft? I made a tracker for starlink satellites but
| think your visualization is much nicer.
|
| [1]https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/code-clinic-tracking-
| starlin...
| matteason wrote:
| Yes absolutely - I'm also using satellite.js so anything with a
| TLE available could be visualised. I'll have a think about how
| I could fit that in the UI.
| matteason wrote:
| By the way, this pairs nicely with the 'ambient radio' feature on
| my other project Ambiphone if you want the full "space exhibit at
| the science museum" experience:
| https://ambiph.one/?m=1-Ambient+radio-bf100
| can16358p wrote:
| I'd love to try but it fails to load and crash the browser tab
| (an error repeatedly occured).
|
| Safari on iPhone.
| nirav72 wrote:
| This is amazing. Anyway to hide the youtube window?
| matteason wrote:
| Yep, there's a settings link in the top left where you can
| toggle that and loads of other stuff :)
| nirav72 wrote:
| Thanks. I found it.
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(page generated 2024-04-29 23:00 UTC)