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I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

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Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#101

Post by aqfamnzc »

jhugo wrote: post #70
robotastic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing a vision only approach would be really cool. A lot of the interesting planes do not have their ADS-B transponder on. The two systems could actually work well together. My system ends up generating a really nice, labeled dataset. I put some initial scripts / notebooks together for building ML models that can classify the different types of aircraft. https://github.com/IQTLabs/SkyScan/tree/main/ml-model/script...

Since 2020-01-01, ADS-B is a requirement in a lot of US airspace (FAR 91.225). Turning it off is allowed for govt / intelligence / law enforcement / military only. Many countries have similar requirements. People often think an aircraft is flying with transponder off because it doesn't appear on FR24/FlightAware. In fact these companies allow blocking aircraft from their service; this is why ADS-B Exchange is better.

In fact, ADS-B E has an option to filter only aircraft not shown on other sites :)

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#102

Post by yftsui »

mike_d wrote: post #65
FearlessNebula wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI if you were able to set this up, it would be trivial for you to share your ADS-B feed with Flightradar24[1]. This would give you a free business plan[2] for as long as you share, which would get you access to that data. [1] https://www.flightradar24.com/build-your-own [2] https://www.flightradar24.com/premium

Instead you should just feed ADSBExchange, which doesn't require premium business plans or other nonsense. They also do not censor the data and will show you planes that the owners don't want you to see. https://www.adsbexchange.com/

Feed ADSBExchange does not have a good return, ADSBExchange have way less data available, they don’t even have a free iOS client. A single Raspberry pi feeds both FlightAware and Flightradar24, they give you free business plan with apps with good user experience. From a normal user’s point, don’t see a good justification to do so.

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#103

Post by tjohns »

PaulHoule wrote: post #100

I've been thinking about building a laser graphics system to write on clouds on nights when there are stratus clouds. I'm worried about lasing an airplane (I am not too close to the airport but not that far either) and was thinking about hooking up an ADS-B receiver to tell the system to keep the beam away from airplanes, even if they are on the other side of the cloud deck. A system like that, funny enough, is suppo…

Keep in mind that not all aircraft are required to transmit an ADS-B signal.

Not to say it couldn’t be done, given the right approvals. You’d possibly be asked to publish a NOTAM to tell aircraft to stay away. The FAA has a publication on this very topic:

https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#104

Post by robotastic »

jcims wrote: post #50
robotastic wrote: post #19

Hi! I am the guy behind this, awesome to see it posted here. Happy to answer any questions. To answer a question I saw pop up, I am using the FAA aircraft registration data to pull up the extra information about the planes. It lists who actually owns the plane, vs who is operating it. That is why you see so many banks. Places like Flightaware have much better data, but a pricy to look up.

Your site got hugged to saturation but this is something I've been wanting to do for a while. I just got a sort-of ridiculous telescope (Celestron 11" SCT on alt/az mount, 2800mm focal length) and have been tinkering with ADSB for years. Can't wait to check out your work!

That would be awesome! How fast can those mounts move? Would they be able to follow an aircraft? I have found that more zoom actually makes things a little tricker because you have to make sure it is leveled and aligned precisely. When my camera is fully zoomed, it has about 1 degree vertical field of view.

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#105

Post by robotastic »

aimor wrote: post #78
robotastic wrote: post #19

Hi! I am the guy behind this, awesome to see it posted here. Happy to answer any questions. To answer a question I saw pop up, I am using the FAA aircraft registration data to pull up the extra information about the planes. It lists who actually owns the plane, vs who is operating it. That is why you see so many banks. Places like Flightaware have much better data, but a pricy to look up.

What would you have to change to capture helicopters too?

It should work for helicopters. In DC, alot of them do not have ADS-B and the flight paths are a little different, so I haven't managed to capture one yet though.

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#106

Post by robotastic »

eggy wrote: post #91

A thought experiment leapt to mind on how one would triangulate (septangulate!) your location based on heading, time, flight information, and their intersections. I suppose you could get within a 100 meters? Very cool photos! When I lived in Macau a while back, I used to listen to the Hong Kong Airport tower on my SDR and try to link it to flight data, but at the time (2011/2012 or so)my connection and the data was n…

Totally - I think you could work back where the camera is based. I have the bearing / azimuth of the camera for each photo, so you could look up where each plane was at that timestamp and then project backwards.

I bet you had much better aircraft flying out of Hong Kong!!

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#109

Post by mackmgg »

robotastic wrote: post #104
jcims wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your site got hugged to saturation but this is something I've been wanting to do for a while. I just got a sort-of ridiculous telescope (Celestron 11" SCT on alt/az mount, 2800mm focal length) and have been tinkering with ADSB for years. Can't wait to check out your work!

That would be awesome! How fast can those mounts move? Would they be able to follow an aircraft? I have found that more zoom actually makes things a little tricker because you have to make sure it is leveled and aligned precisely. When my camera is fully zoomed, it has about 1 degree vertical field of view.

I've got a 6" Celestron, and I think it would be capable of following a plane that's sufficiently high up. It can slew a max of 5°/sec, so that would be ~500mph at 10000' or well over 1500mph at 30000'.

Because it's a telescope, it's designed to be aligned at night. It's more of a pain to do during the day (such as for an eclipse or I guess tracking planes). But there's no reason you couldn't align it to stars at night and it will its alignment pretty precisely. I'm not sure how much drift there is in that over say 24+ hours though. It's also smart enough with the Celestron controller to never point at the sun even during a slew. I'm not sure if it has that same safety feature when controlled from a computer, which would be a major concern with daytime use.

But a 6" f/10 (so ~1500mm lens) telescope with a full frame camera is still a 1° field of view so the same as you have now. Smaller sensor would be tighter field of view.

And of course the obvious drawback: None of this setup would be weatherproof

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#110

Post by _yoqn »

gaetgu wrote: post #74
sydthrowaway wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why dont you use motion sensing cameras? Could detect UFO

clouds, birds, leaves, etc.

• Clouds can be (mostly) ignored by contrast, shape, color • Eliminate all trees from the viewport • Birds would be an added bonus to catch!
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