I read a while ago on Astronomy Blog that there was a Twitter feed called About London (developers’ blog) for International Space Station (ISS) passes overhead, as well as some other things. Basically every time the ISS was due to pass over London a Tweet would appear saying when it was due and where to find it in the sky. Nice idea. But we don’t all live in London and I wanted to make one for my own fair Cardiff.
So here is the Twitter address for Over Cardiff which will currently tell you when the ISS or Hubble are going to be visible: http://www.twitter.com/overcardiff
Twitter is great because its simple. You can receive notifications either by text or IM - or just online by RSS or the Twitter website. I have been wanting to learn a bit more PHP recently so this seemed perfect. While I was at it it seemed easy enough to make some for other cities as well. They are all listed below.
Name changed to Over Somewhere to distinguish this from Above London and associated projects.
This is all new to me so I welcome comments and thoughts from people. Also this is all on the proviso that it may break for a little bit. I think I’ve tested it but in my own experience these things are never tested until they’re used.
Over Aix-en-Provence
Over Birmingham
Over Belfast
Over Cardiff
Over Dublin
Over Edinburgh
Over Hong Kong
Over Indianapolis
Over Milton Keynes
Over Manchester
Over New York
Over Paris
Over San Francisco
Over Sydney
If you any other city requests, then leave the comments here and I’ll see what I can do. The current cities are based more of where I have family and friends than anything else.
I will post an explanation eventually including the PHP for how this was done. Basically I scrape Heaven’s over and then run a separate script for check for upcoming transits.
Enjoy your Twittering.
September 8th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
That’s nice work! I look forward to seeing the code - I wanted to do a similar hack for my location ever since I read about it via Dave Pearson but although I can do the part that checks the data and sends the alert, I haven’t had any experience scraping a site via a standard browser interface and so am at a bit of a loss on how to get the data from Heavens-Above.
September 9th, 2007 at 12:32 am
Great idea! I’d love to see ‘Above Indianapolis’.
September 9th, 2007 at 8:14 am
Todd: Which Indianapolis do you mean? I can find three…
Nick: Code will be going up soon. what is your location?
September 9th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Robert, I’m up in Aberdeen. Look forward to getting a look at the code. Nick
September 9th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Nick the code is up (http://orbitingfrog.com/blog/projects/above/), if you fancy a go for Aberdeen. Otherwise I shall add Aberdeen next time I put new cities in. In the meantime you should only be a minute off the Edinburgh ones.