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Show HN: Beautiful 3D ISS tracker with live video and near-realtime clouds

iss.matteason.co.uk

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Re: Show HN: Beautiful 3D ISS tracker with live video and near-realtime clouds

#21

Post by matteason »

sebosp wrote: post #18

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

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?

Re: Show HN: Beautiful 3D ISS tracker with live video and near-realtime clouds

#22

Post by pimlottc »

matteason wrote: post #19
pimlottc wrote: post #17

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.

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?

Nope, home wifi, Firefox, M1 mac mini

Re: Show HN: Beautiful 3D ISS tracker with live video and near-realtime clouds

#24

Post by spuz »

matteason wrote: post #20
spuz wrote: post #16

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).

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

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

Re: Show HN: Beautiful 3D ISS tracker with live video and near-realtime clouds

#25

Post by mncharity »

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-...

Re: Show HN: Beautiful 3D ISS tracker with live video and near-realtime clouds

#26

Post by matteason »

mncharity wrote: post #25

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 day…

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...

Re: Show HN: Beautiful 3D ISS tracker with live video and near-realtime clouds

#28

Post by nullhole »

spuz wrote: post #16

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).

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...

Re: Show HN: Beautiful 3D ISS tracker with live video and near-realtime clouds

#29

Post by matteason »

nullhole wrote: post #28
spuz wrote: post #16

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).

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...

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

Re: Show HN: Beautiful 3D ISS tracker with live video and near-realtime clouds

#30

Post by matteason »

spuz wrote: post #24
matteason wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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
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