May 22nd and 23rd will be providing some excellent opportunities for seeing the International Space Station from Europe and North America. The details of each sighting vary from place to place, but it is safe to say that the two days and nights will be offering some of the best sightings for a long time.

From Cardiff where I live, you can expect no less than 10 great opportunities over the course of 48 hours! Even as far north as Edinburgh there will be 9 chances. Across North America the frequency of visible transits will also be very high. So if you live in northern Europe or North America, put May 22nd and 23rd in your diary as a good time to look up!

To keep track of these sightings there are many websites to help. Heaven’s Above is a great website that details visible sightings from any location. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch you can use my own web app, LookUp to do much the same thing. If you use Twitter there are several feeds for cities around the world which are useful even if you live up to 100 miles away.

I have also created Google Earth files for tracking the ISS in real time around the Earth. This doesn’t provide viewing predictions, but it is fun to watch it come up to your location and then dash outside to see it pass overhead!

Times vary for all locations but if you’ve never tried to spot the space station then next week would be the time. It’ll be bright, it’ll be obvious and if you miss it, just go outside again an hour or so later and will probably be reappearing.

If anyone has specific requests for parts of the world not yet covered by the Twitter feeds, please email me. I have been looking to add some more to the list, and this seems like a good time.

Continuing my series of posts regarding Google Sky and Google Earth, here is a KMZ file that will let you find some of the prominent and interesting space telescopes and satellites on Google Earth. This file includes real-time position tracking and 1 hour flight paths for:

• Swift Gamma Ray Mission (NASA)
• RoSat (NASA, UK, Germany)
• CoRoT (CNES, ESA)
• GalEx (NASA)
• COBE (NASA)
• IRAS (NASA, UK, Netherlands)
• Envisat (ESA)
• Hubble Space Telescope (NASA, ESA)
• International Space Station (Many)

This KMZ file splits down into several separate files so you can chose to select or deselect any and all of the above objects. Clicking on the satellite or telescope’s icon brings up information about that object with links to more information. Screenshots below for those who like that sort of thing.

To see more Google Earth satellite files check out the general Satellites on Google Earth post and the Chinese Space Debris post. As always, suggestions are welcomed in the comments section. For example, I had created a time-slider dependent satellite tracker but it just ended up being really annoying. Would that be something people would want? Also, as mentioned in a previous comment, I am in the process of creating a tracker that uses a Sketchup model instead of an icon. All thoughts welcome, have fun playing with these.

I was presenting this week’s Astrolunch talk at university. I chose to discuss space debris, and this included a quick overview of the Chinese missile test last year, which create a huge cloud of fragmented debris, much of which is still orbiting the Earth. In January 2007, China launched a surface-to-orbit missile that destroyed a satellite named Fengyun 1C. The act was internationally condemned, though of course no one really punished them.

You can see the debris in this screenshot. Each little Chinese flag is a piece of the satellite that remains in orbit.

If you want to track this debris yourself, you can do so in Google Earth using this handy KMZ file that I’ve created. It uses the same code as my previous efforts for tracking the ISS on Google Earth and tracking satellites on Google Earth in general.

Also, if you’re interested in the talk I gave, you can download the PDF of ‘Space Debris‘.

I wonder if this post will be visible through the Great Firewall of China?

UPDATE: The data used for this Google Earth feed comes directly from NORAD, who provide tracking data for most satellites and other orbiting bodies. I should stress that this only shows the trackable debris. This is only  a percentage of what is up there. Some objects are too small to be tracked by radar and so do not appear.

I have updated and fixed the files for tracking satellites and the ISS on Google Earth. You are no longer offered driving directions to the satellites either.

This one could just be filed under ‘this is really cool’. Also, I can’t believe it has passed me by my entire life. Have you ever heard of a solar furnace? It’s a James- Bond-esque creation which focusses light from the sun on a massive scale to heat a very small area to a very high temperature. They built on in the Pyreness in 1970, a big one, and it can produce 1000 kW per square centimetre!

A solar furnace is a structure made up of a parabolic mirror, which reflects light on to a focal point. In the case of the furnace at Font-Romeu in the French Pyrenees, several small mirrors catch light from a hillside and focus it onto the main mirror as well, adding to the power of the construction. The heat produced can be used to generate electricity or to perform experiments in high-temperature physics.

The solar furnace at Odeillo, Font-Romeu in the Pyrenees of France (pictured here) was opened in 1970 and is the largest in the world. According to Wikipedia, the rays are focused on to an area the size of a cooking pot and this means that they can reach a temperature of up to 3,000 degrees Celsius.

The first modern solar furnace is is still in place at Mont Louis, near to Odeillo. It was built in the 1940s. The Pyrenees were chosen as the site because the can recieve 300 sunny days a year.

Take a look at the large Odeillo furnace on Google Earth, via this KMZ file.

Orbiting Frog has been a busy place in 2008! We are only a small way into the year but already Orbiting Frog seems to have overspilled to the extent to which I feel the need to recap and regroup. So just in case you missed anything, here is a quick overview of what’s been going on here in the past couple of months.

My experimentation with Google Earth and Google Sky has led to several items being created. In Google Earth, the ISS Locator, 100 Brightest Satellites Tracker and the Advanced Any Satellite Tracker have all been very popular and downloaded a combined 5,600 times already. In Google Sky my SCUBA data layer has now been access over 1,500 times and for some reason has inspired several emails - thanks for those! There is also last year’s IRAS 100 Micron all sky coverage for Google Sky which I had forgotten all about.

The LookUp iPhone and iPod Touch app has also been popular. Apple featured it as a Staff Pick and it hung around in the Top 10 for some time. It is now accessed about 2,000 times a day and a recent TUAW bump has kept it visible on the Apple web apps site.

The week of the lunar eclipse led me to post a video on what would be seen. I hosted the video on YouTube to reduce server load and was quite surprised however when it became one of the top videos of the week. You can have quite laugh reading the comments on the YouTube page. No one seemed to grasp that it was made on a computer and several accuse me of tricking them.

The Orbiting Frog Shop launched not too long ago and has been selling lots of t-shirts. More designs will appear all the time so keep your eyes peeled, and if anyone spots one in the wild, I’d love to hear about it.
I have now joined the crew at the Carnival of Space by hosting the 40th edition. The Carnival is a great place to pick up new RSS feeds and bloggers.

Finally I’d just like to thank everyone for taking such an interest. Thanks for all the emails and for actually reading the blog. Now I’m off to create a real blog post (i.e. not about myself) before having some lovely Swiss lunch. Yum.

UPDATE: New Google Earth tracking files for Space Telescopes are now up.

Hot on the heels of putting all the SCUBA data onto Google Sky, I am now sharing some Google Earth goodies. The KML files below will allow you to view the location of any satellite on Google Earth with latitude, longitude and altitude positions updated every 30 seconds.

These Google Earth overlays use the NORAD two-line element (TLE) datasets that are published via the Celestrak website and are used by satellite enthusiasts the world over. I could not find them for Google Earth so have made them available myself.

There are three files that can be downloaded:

1) ISS Locator - A simple file that just tracks the position of the most popular and asked after satellite, the manned International Space Station. Shows the next 2 hours of flight path and the approximate size of the viewing horizon of the ISS (i.e. the area of the Earth’s surface for which the ISS is potentially visible).

2) 100+ Brightest Objects - This file uses Celestrak’s 100 or so brightest objects TLE file to show the locations on Google Earth of between 100-200 of the better known and easier to spot satellites.

3) Advanced Tracker - By default this KML file tracks the ISS from the 100+ file above. However it allows you to change the source TLE and satellite ID to any that you like, thus making it the first Google Earth addition that allows you to track any satellite at all! Instructions are found in the file by clicking its name in Google Earth. This layer also shows the viewing horizon and 2 hour flight path.

Download ISS Locator, 100+ Brightest Objects and Advanced Tracker.

Download All three files together in a zipped archive.