Show HN: ISS in Real Time – 25 Years Aboard the International Space Station

Today my collaborator and I are releasing issinrealtime.org, a multimedia project that plays back every day onboard the ISS. Feedback welcomed.

Here's an article that was just released about it: https://www.collectspace.com/news/news-102725a-iss-in-real-t...

I also wrote a "making of" post about it here: https://benfeist.com/posts/iss-in-real-time/

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callumprentice 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer/ind...

My daughter and I made this 10 years ago for the NASA Space Apps Challenge and I notified a whole bunch of folk at NASA but never heard anything back. Laughably amateurish compared to this magnificent work but it was fun to make.

We actually started work on the next version - a tool that lets you mark begin/end photo frames from those incredible fly-bys and save them off as video but it's maybe not worth it now.

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bfeist 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Very cool! Your idea about auto-generating timelapse videos was taken up by NASA. https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/BeyondThePhotography/CrewEarthObser...

	▲	dylan604 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've always found the timelapse videos from ISS much more interesting than from satellites in geosync at least artistically. The angles are more interesting. I love the ones at night where you can see the city lights, the stars in the background, the Kármán line, auroras, and lightning. One of the first projects I when I was learning how to be a proper hacker by using curl (at least according to certain states) was from NASA images which I would then turn into timelapse videos as well. I used imagery from SOHO to watch the sun on a weekly basis with a cronjob that would run once a week and deliver a video.
	▲	callumprentice 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Wow - that's incredible. I can't wait to take a look. Thanks for the pointer.

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Kye 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Go around them and radio the astronauts on the ISS about it.

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FredPret 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is unbelievably amazing. Instant favourite, along with the Apollo 11 replay site https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/

	▲	jamesmontalvo3 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Is stated in the linked article but in case anyone missed it: same creators as Apollo in Real Time

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jamesmontalvo3 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Awesome work! Surely a huge labor of love to dig up that much content out of the public domain. Congrats on the launch!

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tagami 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Extraordinary work. We’re able to go back to the dates and times when our labs were operational. This context is profound for our engagement with schools around the world. Well done!

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extraduder_ire 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is there a historical record of the data that appears through the ISS stats tracker?

https://iss-mimic.github.io/Mimic/

Lots of interesting information in there, like how much water is getting used, and which direction all the panels are facing.

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9dev 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I turned the awesome work of the ISS Mimic into a Prometheus+Grafana stack a while ago: https://github.com/radiergummi/iss-metrics

Never got around to create bespoke visualisations for all the different kinds of metrics, but having all that data in Grafana made it a lot easier to play around and get insights.

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bfeist 5 days ago | parent [-]

Awesome. You don’t happen to have 25 years of recorded telemetry, do you?

	▲	9dev 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Nope, sorry. But I'd try a friendly request to Lightstreamer (they handle the Telemetry feed), or the NASA and ESA public relations offices; they must keep a database somewhere.

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bfeist 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes and no. I have 7+ years and counting of telemetry recordings but I don't know of a resource that would let me get all of it historically. If you know of one, please let me know. The recordings that I do have will be integrated into the website at some point. I was going to do it as part of the initial launch but I ran out of time.

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phendrenad2 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd love to have a real 24-hour feed of the Earth from the ISS on my wall. But in reality, the ISS loses ground connection constantly.

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jamesmontalvo3 5 days ago | parent [-]

Not really constantly. For 20 seconds every 30 minutes or so when it changes what satellite it’s pointed at, plus longer outages throughout the day depending on satellite usage by other systems. This may be just a minute or so every hour on a high-coverage day, or it may include 15-minute outages occasionally at low-coverage times (typically when the crew are asleep)

	▲	phendrenad2 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's not been my experience. Have you tried watching it for a full day?

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etiennebausson 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nice work, love the access to all the comms history.

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mwigdahl 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Incredible, such a clear labor of love! Thank you for sharing it with the world!

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Areading314 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is there a list of useful science/inventions that this project has led to?

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ericcumbee 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

hard to believe its been 25 years. I remember watching CSPAN at my grandmothers on a friday night watching the live coverage of STS-88 Mating the Russian Zarya Module to the US Unity node.

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lloydatkinson 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Such a shame they want to burn this up

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ta1243 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

25 years and -5 days?

	▲	exitb 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		In five days we will mark 25 years since Expedition 1 begun.