Was just looking through the App Store on iTunes and found an astronomy application for the iPhone/iPod Touch called Starmap [iTunes link]. It will be fun to play with this tomorrow when I can actually install any of these apps. Why Apple has let me browse (and buy) these things a full day before I can even use them, I don’t know.
Starmap costs $11.99 or £6.99.
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.
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.
My LookUp web app has been mentioned on TUAW. It tells you when to spot various satellites including the ISS over just about anywhere in the world. Another app that the article mentions is iSkyGaze which tells you lots of other things. This is actually something I have been working on myself but they seem to have done it really well so I shall leave it at that. Check it out.
Look Up (v1.0) is an iPhone (or iPod touch) web application that can tell you when to look out for satellites in the night sky. It covers pretty much anywhere in the world and predicts transits for the International Space Station, Hubble, Envisat, Genesis 1 and 2 and for a short while will predict appearances by the ailing US spy satellite USA-193, which has been in the news recently.
Not too long ago I put the data from my Over somewhere Twitter feeds into an iPhone edible format. Well that was a very restrictive way of doing things. This site is essentially an iPhone port of the Heaven’s Above website. I found HA hard to use on the iPhone and so this seemed a logical move. I am utilising Yahoo!’s geocode API as well as the EarthTools collection to grab details on timezones and lat/long data for inputted cities and countries.
Using the site should be fairly self-evident. You input your city and country (or city and US state) and then chose the satellite you’d like to try and spot. Hit ‘Search’ and there will be a pause while the script goes to do its magic. All being well, you should then see a list of upcoming transits with details of where and when to look.
Each transit is colour-coded by a traffic light system. Red dots signify that a pass is not worth looking for. Yellow dots are reasonable passes and green dots are excellent (either because they are bright or high in the sky).
For a short time, Heaven’s Above is featuring the ailing US spy satellite, USA-193. This means that Look Up can also tell you where and when to spot this object, which recently made the headlines.
Have a go! This should also work in Safari on any computer. I have not tested it in Firefox or IE. As always, feel free to leave comments here if you have any suggestions or ideas for improvements. I was thinking of incorporating weather predictions for the transits and the ability to search for any objects that may be easy to spot on a particular evening.
To add the app to your iPhone or iPod touch, just navigate to http://orbitingfrog.com/lookup.
Okay this gets a bit tenuous, but what the hell? If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch and live in any of my Over Twitter feed cities (Aix, Birmingham, Belfast, Cardiff, Dublin, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Indianapolis, Honolulu, Mauna Kea, Manchester, Milton Keynes, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Sydney) then you might want to add this next item to your device.
I wanted to make an iPhone app and so used the same database that is used for my Over… feeds. It works pretty nicely and I even have a lovely icon that will place itself on your home page properly. Consider it beta, of course. Basically you can browse by city and this will tell you all the transits that are going on in the next 10 days.
http://orbitingfrog.com/iphone
I am still working on a way to add any city to these services but to do so properly will require some hefty calculations, which I’m not sure I have time for right now. Anyway, all comments welcome on this iPhone/iPod web app.
