At first I was going to wonder what the benefit of this above something like www.heavens-above.com is, and then I went all the way through. The real benefit is, I think, the use of a street view visualization to show where the satellites are going to be in the sky.
I would suggest that it might make sense to emphasize that technology over the globe-with-satellite view, as it's a much better trick to pull off.
Thanks! The problem is street view is expensive. I would love to load it at startup but I would run out my free Maps API quota more quickly. (That may happen anyway if this gets popular.) I'm hoping that this way people who aren't that interested bounce before loading street view so that the quota is reserved for people who are really interested.
Makes sense. As many others have noted, nice integration of Street View and satellite data!
Shameless plug: we at NetToolKit recently launched a very affordable geocoder that includes rooftop-level geocoding for most of the US (using OpenAddresses data). You can test out the accuracy here: https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/demo
We'd be thrilled if you would consider using our service (first 1,000 requests per day can be free).
it's a great site, I'm gonna see if I can spot the satellite in a few minutes :)
could you maybe also draw the path of the satellite as a faint line where the dot moves over? the entire path wasn't in view meaning I had to wait for the animation, if you get my point.
oh and another idea, could you make it so you can also pan the height at which you look in the streetview? Because I was looking out of my window on the second floor, but streetview is at street level. I dont know if that's a possible feature, though.
Street view is awesome especially for less than novices like me. The daytime street view is good because I know ah that’s in my back garden or I better go on the street and look right to see it. A star map projected onto a daytime augmented reality would be useful too if someone created that.
I love the Street view integration, as people have already said.
However, I plugged in an address that I know will be accurate when put into Google Maps, but it put me at the generic center of my zip code. That is still close enough to figure things out, but I'm curious why an address would work on Maps, but not this site?
I'm using a free geocoding service instead of Google Maps, to preserve my free quota for Street View. If you load it on your phone you'll get GPS location instead of geocoding which should work better.
Others have already said that the street view integration is amazing but I just want to say that I think it's actually better than most of the live sattelite augmented reality apps I've used, which just never seem to work for me and even after looking at them for ten minutes I still can't tell what's going on. It's really awesome
Yes! As long as you can see a few stars then you should be able to see most of the satellites that the site shows. The International Space Station in particular can be brighter than any star.
Yes. You can reliably see ISS in urban locations -- it's actually quite cool to do a few times.
It will be a point of light, moving very fast against the background, just as shown in some of the animations in OP. If the geometry is set up so you can see the whole overpass (nearly horizon-to-horizon) it will still last only a couple of minutes.
It will happen around sunset, when the sunlight is shining on ISS, but it's dark (or dusky at least) on the ground. You don't see ISS easily at night because it will be in Earth's shadow.
My browser is too simple to support location pop up dialogs (it's some lightweight webview wrapper from f-droid with a workflow that I like), I figured it wouldn't work but after a few seconds it fell back to IP based geolocation. Very happily surprised :)
And like someone else already said, street view works fine with a coarse location like a city name, so long as the name is unique and you don't end up in another country.
Kudos! Very nicely done. It would be nice to have an easy way to see more details about the satellite. For example, I see that tonight I can see CZ-2C R/B, though without a search I do not quite know anything more about the satellite.
Also like the night mode in the street view. Does that come with the Google Maps API or something you had to build?
Good suggestion, I'd like to add some info about the satellites. I made the "night mode" for Street View with an SVG filter applied to the street view canvas with CSS.
A kind of similar thing I'd like to see is something for geosynchronous satellites that tells you now, and at future times of your choosing, where they are relative to the visible constellations at your location.
That could make finding a good spot for a satellite dish a lot easier. Pick a time at night, find out what constellation the satellite will be in then, and later all you have to do is go out at that time and find a spot where you can see the right part of that constellation.
This is great! Just wanted to ask did you miss out Iridium flares due to API quota but then found out on HA that the next one is in 10 days for my location (northern Serbia). They were much more frequent last time I checked (10 years ago)
Yeah, I think the satellites that made flares are getting deorbited now. I don't support showing Iridium flares. It's more complex to calculate them because they are specular reflections instead of diffuse and so they require knowing the orientation of the satellite very accurately.
The new generation of Iridium satellites don't flare. All of the next-gen satellites were launched over the past couple years, and the older generation is being phased out (and deorbited) as the new ones come online.
On the home page I thought, yeah sure but how am I gonna know exactly where to look exactly when and how long do I have...
...and then the first result was the ISS moving in real-time laid over my street view, and all my questions were perfectly answered. I mean, I know what building to look above down to the second!
So just -- super-kudos, one of the cleverest things I've seen in a while.
Cool concept but the implementation is terrible. Just give me a button to input my own location. Not to mention the dot on the globe is about 3,000 miles from the street view it gives me.
That is likely to happen if you decline location permission and the IP geolocation fallback is inaccurate. If you try on your phone it should get an accurate GPS location. Adding a way to manually override the location by specifying latitude and longitude is on my to-do list.
If my apartment windows opened I could throw a rock to the spot where the streetview was taken from (though that would probably bother some people). While I agree a custom input location would be cool I suspect it's because you didn't ok the geo permission.
It is visible for a couple weeks every couple months. Could just be coincidence (though kudos for good marketing if it's planned!). I am wondering though if there's a prioritization for visibility going on, like `maximumBy (comparing brightness) (filter isInLOS allSatellites)` or if there's some prioritization by known-ness. I suspect ISS would score high in both.
This is very cool application of technology. I have always wanted to see the ISS but did not know where to look in the sky. The Google Street View integration tells me exactly where to look.
https://issdetector.com (ISS is free, not sure about the other objects) does that and you can set up an alarm.
You can point your phone at the sky and see the exact path, visibility conditions etc but wow that Google Street integration by OP makes ISS Detector feel almost outdated.
Especially important in a city where a lot of times buildings will make the sighting impossible.
I'd recommend showing this + the time zone (e.g. "browser local time, UTC+2"). My guess was that it's the local time of the location entered, which can matter when telling someone "hey, you'll be able to see a cool satellite looking out your northward window at 9 pm!". If you're worried about keeping a clean look, at least add a tooltip.
(I've also been trained to distrust any time that doesn't specify a time zone, because I've seen sites that default to some random US timezone, use your local time, use UTC, ...)
> I've also been trained to distrust any time that doesn't specify a time zone
My pet peeve is status pages that only show times in some US timezone. I'm supposed to know what the conversion from that timezone to my timezone is, and then the timezone to my servers (which are in UTC)...
This is such a great example of building products that serve the need of the customer - nails it with zero ambiguity. Please blog about how you did it, software stack, your thought process and be it a reminder that deep thoughtful approach towards a problem can deliver exceptional results.
Heavens Above will give you a list of all satellites passing overhead. If you go to "Daily predictions of brighter satellites" it will give a big list of satellites that should be visible from your location. The lower the magnitude, the brighter it will be.
In a city you obviously aren't going to see much because of light pollution (although the ISS is one of the brightest objects, so it should be visible in most cities). If you go to the middle of nowhere, and give your eyes time to adjust to the darkness (around 30 mins), you will see satellites basically all the time and may even see the milky way (it looks like the pictures, but black and white as our eyes can't pick up enough light to detect the colour).
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadI would suggest that it might make sense to emphasize that technology over the globe-with-satellite view, as it's a much better trick to pull off.
Or even just a screenshot.
(you probably could not do it with a streetview photo, because of their terms, but a generic photo would totally do)
> (you probably could not do it with a streetview photo, because of their terms, but a generic photo would totally do)
My fuzzy recollection is some years-ago TOS permitted showing the service being used?
(better interface. but then again, it might make too many people use it)
What he should do is, ask for free « open-source » credits, for the glory of science. That’s something Google would get behind.
Shameless plug: we at NetToolKit recently launched a very affordable geocoder that includes rooftop-level geocoding for most of the US (using OpenAddresses data). You can test out the accuracy here: https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/demo
We'd be thrilled if you would consider using our service (first 1,000 requests per day can be free).
could you maybe also draw the path of the satellite as a faint line where the dot moves over? the entire path wasn't in view meaning I had to wait for the animation, if you get my point.
However, I plugged in an address that I know will be accurate when put into Google Maps, but it put me at the generic center of my zip code. That is still close enough to figure things out, but I'm curious why an address would work on Maps, but not this site?
The implementation is just magical. Well done!
Edit: Of course http://i2.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/t...
It will be a point of light, moving very fast against the background, just as shown in some of the animations in OP. If the geometry is set up so you can see the whole overpass (nearly horizon-to-horizon) it will still last only a couple of minutes.
It will happen around sunset, when the sunlight is shining on ISS, but it's dark (or dusky at least) on the ground. You don't see ISS easily at night because it will be in Earth's shadow.
And like someone else already said, street view works fine with a coarse location like a city name, so long as the name is unique and you don't end up in another country.
Also like the night mode in the street view. Does that come with the Google Maps API or something you had to build?
A kind of similar thing I'd like to see is something for geosynchronous satellites that tells you now, and at future times of your choosing, where they are relative to the visible constellations at your location.
That could make finding a good spot for a satellite dish a lot easier. Pick a time at night, find out what constellation the satellite will be in then, and later all you have to do is go out at that time and find a spot where you can see the right part of that constellation.
Until they do, I'll hide the notifications button in Safari.
On the home page I thought, yeah sure but how am I gonna know exactly where to look exactly when and how long do I have...
...and then the first result was the ISS moving in real-time laid over my street view, and all my questions were perfectly answered. I mean, I know what building to look above down to the second!
So just -- super-kudos, one of the cleverest things I've seen in a while.
(Edit: ninja-ed)
We'll include it in The Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com) next week.
You can point your phone at the sky and see the exact path, visibility conditions etc but wow that Google Street integration by OP makes ISS Detector feel almost outdated.
Especially important in a city where a lot of times buildings will make the sighting impossible.
(I've also been trained to distrust any time that doesn't specify a time zone, because I've seen sites that default to some random US timezone, use your local time, use UTC, ...)
My pet peeve is status pages that only show times in some US timezone. I'm supposed to know what the conversion from that timezone to my timezone is, and then the timezone to my servers (which are in UTC)...
Can you do this with airplanes too? Might be fun to "see" where they're from/going.
Upon sitting on a roof some weeks ago in Texas, I thought I spotted at least 5 or 6+ within 30 minutes. Is this probable?
In a city you obviously aren't going to see much because of light pollution (although the ISS is one of the brightest objects, so it should be visible in most cities). If you go to the middle of nowhere, and give your eyes time to adjust to the darkness (around 30 mins), you will see satellites basically all the time and may even see the milky way (it looks like the pictures, but black and white as our eyes can't pick up enough light to detect the colour).
https://heavens-above.com/
If you ever want to get depressed about how humans have ruined the space around our planet... http://stuffin.space/