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Wow, that's nice! I must admit I wasn't particularly curious about it but a fortuitous click over the region where I live returned some really nice pictures! Nice exploration tool!

A feature request if I may: it would be incredible if somehow I could zoom in a bit on the world map as there are so many shots over multiple passes of the ISS that it's very hard to pinpoint the desired place on the map, it's almost by chance sometimes.

Yeah, I tried to select the Bay Area and had a bit of a difficult time doing so :(
Yeah - sometimes their web server seems to stall. That was the main reason we added a feature to turn off the thumbnails - getting those slows things down a lot - not sure if they are throttling it somehow.
You can always manually enter the lat/lng (37.7749, -122.4194) in the URL until I figure a way to make zoom work.
Thank you and zooming is a great idea that I hadn't considered after the switch from the WebGL globe (which did that of course). I'll add that to the list - thank you.
I'm not sure about the utility of the whole thing - I think I'd just like to filter the images (bottom two panes) according to the section of the World I'd zoomed in the top pane. I'd have top-left, World map; bottom-left thumbnails; full-page-right current image. So I could zoom to an area of the World, all images that cover that area would be in the thumbnails, select a thumbnail to view. Ideally if zoomed enough then there might be outlines on the World map that show the imaged areas available.

Cool idea though.

Understood and I like your suggestion. The problem we had trying to preview too much was that pulling the 'small' (still quite large) images off their web server for each lat/lng point seemed to bring it to its' knees. I wish there was a quick way to see a thumbnail - that opens up a bunch of ideas. I considered downloading all 3.5M images (in batches) and converting to 128x128 thumbs to store and serve locally but probably not good form to do that to NASA and my tired old computer would get rather sad I think.

Hopefully someone else will be inspired to improve on the idea though.

I am not a Nastronaut, but I think NASA wold love this project; they’re keen to show off their work and engage with the public as much as possible.

Making thumbnails of the images seems like a useful task in itself.

Yeah - I reached out to the people listed o nthe main photo page - we'll see if they are able to respond.
This is so cool! Thanks for sharing and great job to you both, some great wallpaper worthy shots here
Again - thank you for the kind comments - we both really appreciate it.
Very cool. In a few moments I was able to find this picture of Hawaii, looks like there's some impression in the surface. Old volcano, meteor? :)

https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/DatabaseImages/ESC/large/ISS052/ISS...

Amazing creation! How old is your daughter? Very cool project for the two of you.
Thanks - she's almost 9 and loves tech, esp after the remote schooling on a laptop since the lockdown. She can't wait to get back to building stuff in Roblox though :)
> She can't wait to get back to building stuff in Roblox though :)

Roblox is an excellent programming environment if you weren't aware, that might be of interest? :)

https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/

Interesting - I hadn't looked into that yet but I will. Still trying to get over her using Roblox vs Second Life which is what I work on :)
Amazing. Very convenient, it's so cool to browse such an incredible catalog so easy.. great job guys, thanks for sharing!
So pleased you found it useful - thanks for taking the time to comment.
Cool. After like 5 random clicks, all I get is black as the bottom images. Eventually the bottom right says "unable to load this image".
Yeah - it seems to struggle serving up images sometimes sadly. Sorry - I don't think there is anything I can do except perhaps add some kind of loading... graphic.
Where's the blog post with photos of your daughter! Aside, excellent work!
Are you intentionally trying to be creepy or just tonedeaf?
LOL, c'mon guys. That was a parody of comments, and software engineers who really do make such posts. I like to think I am not a creep, thanks.
You might not think of yourself as a creep, but your comment was indinstinguishable from that of a creep. To the young woman in question, you are just another dude who sees her as a sex object. It doesn't matter if you thought it was a joke; you're a part of the problem.

> I like to think I am not a creep, thanks.

Then don't fukkin act like one, genius.

And this shit is why we don't have more diversity in tech.
Well done, you passed the test.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t see much in this one. When I tried a few locations by tapping around on the map, I only got black screens at the bottom even for the places that were supposed to have many photos. And then I found that the back navigation was hijacked by the site and it didn’t work for me. I’m using Firefox Focus on iOS, if that’s of any help to figure out what’s happening.
yeah - sometimes their web server seems to stall. That was the main reason we added a feature to turn off the thumbnails - getting those slows things down a lot - not sure if they are throttling it somehow.

Might also be a FF/iOS issue - I'll take a look.

Very cool. Maybe consider adding a fallback image for the thumbnails while they load since sometimes it takes a while.
Yep - you can replace them with a placeholder which makes thing much faster but of course, hides the content. I think there is a way to load a low res version first and have it be replaced when the full res one arrives. Shame the server doesn't provide thumbnails - only "small" and "large" as far as I can tell.
Neat!

Looks like they had some computer trouble: https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_fla...

(In case the link isn't stable, they photo'd their computer having a kernel panic.)

Brilliant - I wa hoping it might be a good way to share interesting photos like this - thank you.
Having a chat over a beer some years later: 'so I was taking some pictures when the kernel crashed..400km above the earth'...
Stable link: https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ISS02...

(It’d be neat to have the image ID in the explorer link to this page.)

Great idea - thank you. Off the top of my head, I am not sure if I have the information I need though - actually - I do! I have the mission, roll and frame - much better than hoping my site is around forever.

What do you think - a share think page link that goes to the appropriate version of what you posted?

Added your suggestion since it was easy to do - thank you for the idea.
Glad I could help—and thank you for making this!
Merged both of your other PRs in wolfgang - really appreciate the contributions.

(He was kind enough to patches for improving the to the NASA page for each photo and letting the About box scroll so you could read it!)

Cheers!

I’m getting a “Loading data” page but no indication if the site is working. Has the sudden load taken it down?
I have found the performance of the image web server to be very spotty - I don't know if that's by design.

I do hope I haven't contributed to taking it down - that would be awful.

When I land on the page, I get three history entries in my browser as your page loads. This means that if I have no interactions with the site and want to go back to HN, I need to click back three times.

While I get that this isn't a bug, it is a usability peeve that I notice on more and more sites lately.

It's not a new pattern though.

Before they've done it for telemetry and identifying which initiative this click is from. Nowadays it's just that they're redirecting the default route to a particular site after, so they could potentially switch the site they redirect to later.

While a small annoyance to mobile users which go there from sites like hn, it does give the owner of the site a tiny amount of control where ppl end up on their site.

At least that's my interpretation...

Still so annoying. I wish browsers at least might do something like skip quick redirects in history?
Browsers could pin recent other sites to the bottom of the visible history, so you can still leaf back within a website but moving back to the previous site is also very easy.
On desktop you can usually long-press the back button to get a list of the recent history and jump back two steps to avoid getting stuck.
Got it and will integrate now - much appreciated and much better than the endless entries. Thank you.
Not everyone has your knowledge and ability
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not familiar with GitHub, please correct me if I'm wrong.

A pull request (PR) includes the changes needed to fix the issue - the OP used their knowledge and ability to help :)

You can see the actual file change here: https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/p...

Thank you. The parent to my comment originally had a snarky "and it only took me 45 seconds" to imply that instead of complaining the person he was replying to should have done what he did and opened a PR instead. Maybe I should reply using quotes so this sort of thing doesn't happen :)
Ahhhh! Yeah that makes sense, sorry for the assume! :)
Merged it in and looks like it's in place - hopefully fix that nasty issue. Many thanks for the fix.
It's a shame that the video livestream https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESRS/HDEV/ is not working anymore :(
Agreed - that was spectacular.
I really loved HDEV, especially watching sunrises & sunsets.

I have ~40,000 screengrabs I took for my twitter bot @hdevcam between 2015 - 2017 availible at http://billeberly.com/hdev if you want to relive those days.

Sadly, they're not the best quality - despite being the High Definition Viewing Experiment they never seemed to actually transmit in high def. And the files are just timestamped - the tweets had the locations too, but they weren't stored with the files. Maybe I should go do that on a rainy day sometime...

Fantastic and thanks for sharing - I can't wait to take a look. Sounds like a brilliant rainy Sunday afternoon project :)
Awesome! Would be super cool if the map could be zoomed so I can try to catch pictures of my region :)
Yep - had a couple of requests for that and will work on it later today - good idea - thank you.
What is the standard tool the industry uses to analyze pictures like this? I see these are JPEG's, that can't be the best format for this type of data, is it?
I would have imagined they capture images with all kinds of visible/non-visibles light too - perhaps this is just the bucket that they dump the images from pr0/consumer devices into?
JPEG is good for display. If you want to do any sort of analysis on the image, you'll want a lossless format that can handle multiple channels and the georeferencing metadata. TIFF is pretty good for that. There are a bunch depending on what sensor you're getting them from and what you plan on doing with them. And how sensitive you are to having a pallet of hard drives fed-exed to your office.

GDAL (https://gdal.org) is a wonderful tool that can handle essentially any geographic raster image imaginable. Tools like ArcGis or Grass can also deal pretty well with hyperspectral images. Lots of GIS shops also roll very customized image pipelines if they have particular needs.

ux is bad

can i meet your daughter to fix it?

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Some of those are close to what I was thinking might be good for a sequence capture - provide a way to make the start/end of a sequence and then the page generates a bunch of curl commands to grabs them perhaps. Once you have them locally, making a moving would be quite straightforward.
ISS-EOL website[0] provides videos (though the interface is quite... uncomfortable to say the least), and you can get a zipfile with all the images provided, JPEG+EXIF metadata and all. I've been helping a friend do exactly what you said for the last year or so[1], amongst other things.

[0] https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/Videos/CrewEarthObservationsVideos/

[1] https://youtu.be/JfNuRce2FEE

Excellent. Thanks for heads up and I’ll take a look. Especially, thank you for That video. It’s truly spectacular - thank you for sharing.
Great service! All it took to find these less beautiful pictures of Germany was the rough location from google maps entered in the url:

https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_fla...

It shows why Germans still burn coal in their houses. A lot of closeups of the surface mining of coal outside Cologne.

Author here. Thanks so much for the comments and even code fixes already. So very much appreciated - we had a mountain of fun working on it and I'm glad people are finding it useful too. Sounds like we need to add zooming next..

I really think it'd be great for finding and capturing long time lapse sequences - the few I have seen over the years are truly spectacular but I suspect there are many more out (in??) there waiting to be discovered.

Wow really great way to explore this! Runs fine on Firefox focus, but not on 'regular' Firefox mobile
oh no - I used Chrome on iOS but I can take a look at Firefox - it might be a simple fix. Did you see anything in the console ?
I want to check this out, but it's crashing on Firefox 77.0.1 on Linux. Seems cool though!
Is there anything in the console to indicate what went wrong? Happy to fix it if I can.
Looks like it was a low memory issue on my part. Cool site!
There are some truly incredible photos there..
Please do post the great ones - I'm making a collection.
I had a great time exploring randomly some places, our planet is too beautiful seen from above.
It really is isn't it.. I hope to see it one day in person but I think that option is rapidly diminishing for me at least - perhaps my daughter.