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.
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.
