
Show HN: My daughter and I made a site to explore the photos from the ISS - callumprentice
https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_flat/index.html?lat=30&lng=-60&pn=6&ph=0#
======
Chetane
That's great! Below are some beautiful captures of aurora borealis:

\-
[https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_fla...](https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_flat/index.html?lat=51&lng=-51&pn=154&ph=0#)
\-
[https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_fla...](https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_flat/index.html?lat=47&lng=-62&pn=77&ph=0#)
\-
[https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_fla...](https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_flat/index.html?lat=50&lng=-38&pn=40&ph=0#)

~~~
callumprentice
Some of those are close to what I was thinking might be good for a sequence
capture - provide a way to make the start/end of a sequence and then the page
generates a bunch of curl commands to grabs them perhaps. Once you have them
locally, making a moving would be quite straightforward.

~~~
dr_zoidberg
ISS-EOL website[0] provides videos (though the interface is quite...
uncomfortable to say the least), and you can get a zipfile with all the images
provided, JPEG+EXIF metadata and all. I've been helping a friend do exactly
what you said for the last year or so[1], amongst other things.

[0]
[https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/Videos/CrewEarthObservationsVideos/](https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/Videos/CrewEarthObservationsVideos/)

[1] [https://youtu.be/JfNuRce2FEE](https://youtu.be/JfNuRce2FEE)

~~~
callumprentice
Excellent. Thanks for heads up and I’ll take a look. Especially, thank you for
That video. It’s truly spectacular - thank you for sharing.

------
darken
Neat!

Looks like they had some computer trouble:
[https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_fla...](https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_flat/index.html?lat=47&lng=-109&pn=30&ph=0)

(In case the link isn't stable, they photo'd their computer having a kernel
panic.)

~~~
wolfgang42
Stable link:
[https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ISS02...](https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ISS026&roll=E&frame=8810)

(It’d be neat to have the image ID in the explorer link to this page.)

~~~
callumprentice
Great idea - thank you. Off the top of my head, I am not sure if I have the
information I need though - actually - I do! I have the mission, roll and
frame - much better than hoping my site is around forever.

What do you think - a share think page link that goes to the appropriate
version of what you posted?

~~~
callumprentice
Added your suggestion since it was easy to do - thank you for the idea.

~~~
wolfgang42
Glad I could help—and thank _you_ for making this!

~~~
callumprentice
Merged both of your other PRs in wolfgang - really appreciate the
contributions.

(He was kind enough to patches for improving the to the NASA page for each
photo and letting the About box scroll so you could read it!)

Cheers!

------
caiobegotti
Wow, that's nice! I must admit I wasn't particularly curious about it but a
fortuitous click over the region where I live returned some really nice
pictures! Nice exploration tool!

A feature request if I may: it would be incredible if somehow I could zoom in
a bit on the world map as there are so many shots over multiple passes of the
ISS that it's very hard to pinpoint the desired place on the map, it's almost
by chance sometimes.

~~~
saagarjha
Yeah, I tried to select the Bay Area and had a bit of a difficult time doing
so :(

~~~
callumprentice
Yeah - sometimes their web server seems to stall. That was the main reason we
added a feature to turn off the thumbnails - getting those slows things down a
lot - not sure if they are throttling it somehow.

------
walrus01
One of the really interesting things about the ISS photos NASA publishes...
They've been doing it for 20+ years now, so there's a lot of historical high
res data to go through. Pretty much from the first days that high-quality
fully digital SLR cameras were available in the early 2000s, NASA flew them to
the ISS. Even the photos from 2001 are really crisp.

If you look carefully at the computers in the photos from 1999 onwards, you'll
be able to see NASA's evolution through more than a dozen generations of
Thinkpad laptops. I think they started with A20 / T20 models (600 MHz mobile
Pentium 3) and went onwards from there. There's a number of photos where
you'll see 5 or 6 thinkpads tilted at various angles clustered around one area
to form a workstation.

[https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/multimedia/galler...](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/multimedia/gallery/index.html)

[https://images.nasa.gov](https://images.nasa.gov)

an array of thinkpads:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad#/media/File:ISS-38_EV...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad#/media/File:ISS-38_EVA-1_Laptops.jpg)

~~~
dmurray
Is it surprising they've stuck with them through the Lenovo era? I'd expect
NASA to have a policy of buying American (I know components are going to be
made in China regardless) even when there isn't a national security
consideration.

~~~
Joeri
They switched to HP ZBooks in 2016. Interesting article listing all the models
used: [https://www.techrepublic.com/article/from-
windows-10-linux-i...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/from-
windows-10-linux-ipads-iphones-to-hololens-the-tech-space-station-astronauts-
use/)

~~~
neop1x
For example HP Elitebooks are made by Inventec. Look at ODM
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laptop_brands_and_ma...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laptop_brands_and_manufacturers)
. Actual prpduct brand names don't mean that much...

------
ivanstojic
When I land on the page, I get three history entries in my browser as your
page loads. This means that if I have no interactions with the site and want
to go back to HN, I need to click back three times.

While I get that this isn't a bug, it is a usability peeve that I notice on
more and more sites lately.

~~~
switz
I sent a PR to fix this.

[https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/p...](https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/pull/5)

~~~
sinsterizme
Not everyone has your knowledge and ability

~~~
corobo
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not familiar
with GitHub, please correct me if I'm wrong.

A pull request (PR) includes the changes needed to fix the issue - the OP used
their knowledge and ability to help :)

You can see the actual file change here:
[https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/p...](https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/pull/5/files)

~~~
sinsterizme
Thank you. The parent to my comment originally had a snarky "and it only took
me 45 seconds" to imply that instead of complaining the person he was replying
to should have done what he did and opened a PR instead. Maybe I should reply
using quotes so this sort of thing doesn't happen :)

~~~
corobo
Ahhhh! Yeah that makes sense, sorry for the assume! :)

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AnonC
Unfortunately, I couldn’t see much in this one. When I tried a few locations
by tapping around on the map, I only got black screens at the bottom even for
the places that were supposed to have many photos. And then I found that the
back navigation was hijacked by the site and it didn’t work for me. I’m using
Firefox Focus on iOS, if that’s of any help to figure out what’s happening.

~~~
callumprentice
yeah - sometimes their web server seems to stall. That was the main reason we
added a feature to turn off the thumbnails - getting those slows things down a
lot - not sure if they are throttling it somehow.

Might also be a FF/iOS issue - I'll take a look.

------
numlock86
> My daughter and I made a site to explore the photos from the ISS

Since you didn't just write "we made a site" but instead choose to explicitly
state your daughter's part in it, you sparked some interest. How was she
involved?

I could not find anything on the site itself.

~~~
callumprentice
Good point and that's an oversight - I had made an earlier version and wanted
to update it with the latest mission photos. She very much enjoyed playing
with the original but had trouble making it do what she wanted and had some
suggestions. Over the last couple of weekends we made a new design (mostly
her) and wrote some code (mostly me) but we talked about things like lat/lng
and how they can be used to position a point on earth, the math code (at a
high level) needed to convert them so they appear on the screen - that sort of
thing. She's such an interested, engaged little thing that she appeared to
love every minute of it - warmed my heart.

------
callumprentice
Author here. Thanks so much for the comments and even code fixes already. So
very much appreciated - we had a mountain of fun working on it and I'm glad
people are finding it useful too. Sounds like we need to add zooming next..

I really think it'd be great for finding and capturing long time lapse
sequences - the few I have seen over the years are truly spectacular but I
suspect there are many more out (in??) there waiting to be discovered.

------
7373737373
It's a shame that the video livestream
[https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESRS/HDEV/](https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESRS/HDEV/) is
not working anymore :(

~~~
callumprentice
Agreed - that was spectacular.

~~~
imjustabill
I really loved HDEV, especially watching sunrises & sunsets.

I have ~40,000 screengrabs I took for my twitter bot @hdevcam between 2015 -
2017 availible at [http://billeberly.com/hdev](http://billeberly.com/hdev) if
you want to relive those days.

Sadly, they're not the best quality - despite being the High Definition
Viewing Experiment they never seemed to actually transmit in high def. And the
files are just timestamped - the tweets had the locations too, but they
weren't stored with the files. Maybe I should go do that on a rainy day
sometime...

~~~
callumprentice
Fantastic and thanks for sharing - I can't wait to take a look. Sounds like a
brilliant rainy Sunday afternoon project :)

------
eatYourFood
How do you get your daughter into this? Mine just wants to paint and sculpt
clay - she hates anything computer related because her school has "STEM" class
where the force computers and STEM down their throats.

She maintains straight A's in everything except sport so ability isn't her
issue. She hates academics in general though, her A's are because she's scared
of doing badly / getting attention from her teachers.

Maybe mainstream schooling isn't for her. Total shite.

~~~
erdaniels
What's wrong with wanting to paint and sculpt clay?

~~~
eatYourFood
The most likely outcome with a career in art is living close to poverty.

~~~
AtlasLion
But happy instead of spending your life doing something you don't like and
dreaming about "escaping the rat race". Success in life is not measured by how
much you own.

~~~
eatYourFood
I agree that people should be happy. My daughter living in an area where she
can't walk at home in the evening is not happy. Not being able to heat your
home because you can't afford a decent place with good windows is not happy.
Having the other people decide what you can or cannot do because you are not
solvent is not happy.

She can happily take over as managing partner of my firm if she wants and cash
out or use that expensive school education to get a top job and learn to FIRE
early; she has options.

------
quickthrower2
Thanks. I had to find Sydney, here is a reasonable one with the distinctive
Bondi Beach (approx top-center):
[https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/DatabaseImages/ESC/large/ISS005/ISS...](https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/DatabaseImages/ESC/large/ISS005/ISS005-E-20717.jpg).
CBD and Harbour Bridge are covered by clouds.

~~~
callumprentice
Excellent - might be a good idea to add a button get your location's lat/lng -
looking up where you are in always a fun thing to do.

------
yellow_lead
Very cool. In a few moments I was able to find this picture of Hawaii, looks
like there's some impression in the surface. Old volcano, meteor? :)

[https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/DatabaseImages/ESC/large/ISS052/ISS...](https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/DatabaseImages/ESC/large/ISS052/ISS052-E-14914.jpg)

~~~
sci_prog
It's Diamond Head

~~~
cipherzero
Yes here is the wiki:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Head,_Hawaii](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Head,_Hawaii)

~~~
callumprentice
Fantastic - as per earlier comment, I'm thrilled people can share interesting
images like this.

------
remote_phone
I’m getting a “Loading data” page but no indication if the site is working.
Has the sudden load taken it down?

~~~
callumprentice
I have found the performance of the image web server to be very spotty - I
don't know if that's by design.

I do hope I haven't contributed to taking it down - that would be awful.

------
markn951
Wow, this is way better than the site that other guy made to explore the
photos from ISIS

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aflag
Doesn't seem to load in Firefox on my mobile.

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ryanisnan
Amazing creation! How old is your daughter? Very cool project for the two of
you.

~~~
callumprentice
Thanks - she's almost 9 and loves tech, esp after the remote schooling on a
laptop since the lockdown. She can't wait to get back to building stuff in
Roblox though :)

~~~
cameronbrown
> She can't wait to get back to building stuff in Roblox though :)

Roblox is an excellent programming environment if you weren't aware, that
might be of interest? :)

[https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/](https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/)

~~~
callumprentice
Interesting - I hadn't looked into that yet but I will. Still trying to get
over her using Roblox vs Second Life which is what I work on :)

------
coronadisaster
The purple lines hide the map so I don't know where to click and this website
kind of hijack the back button.... besides that, it appears to be a very nice
project.

~~~
callumprentice
The purple lines show the location of all the photos - maybe should be a layer
of their own and an option to vary opacity? It looks purple because the HSL
color selected for that mission is purple and they took an awful lot of
photos.

Someone was kind enough to submit a patch that fixes the back button should be
okay now.

~~~
coronadisaster
not sure what the best solution is but maybe those purple lines are not needed
at all if you show pictures closest to where the user clicked on the map... or
maybe make the map bigger so the lines are further away from each other

~~~
callumprentice
Noted - it's not great now and I'll see what I can do to improve it.

------
pcnix
Looking at the code, this looks neat and minimal. I love the style.

I was struck by how simple and effective an idea this was, and the clean
implementation. Great work!

~~~
callumprentice
That's very kind and thank you - the photos are a great resource and hopefully
this will inspire other people to build and improve on our simple design.

------
augustt
Very cool. Maybe consider adding a fallback image for the thumbnails while
they load since sometimes it takes a while.

~~~
callumprentice
Yep - you can replace them with a placeholder which makes thing much faster
but of course, hides the content. I think there is a way to load a low res
version first and have it be replaced when the full res one arrives. Shame the
server doesn't provide thumbnails - only "small" and "large" as far as I can
tell.

------
dddw
Wow really great way to explore this! Runs fine on Firefox focus, but not on
'regular' Firefox mobile

~~~
callumprentice
oh no - I used Chrome on iOS but I can take a look at Firefox - it might be a
simple fix. Did you see anything in the console ?

~~~
Jon_Lowtek
"ResizeObserver" is not yet available in Firefox ESR and Firefox Mobile (v68):
[https://caniuse.com/#feat=resizeobserver](https://caniuse.com/#feat=resizeobserver)

~~~
callumprentice
Ah - got it. I used that in an earlier project too. I will take a look and see
if there is another way to do what I want without it. Thank you.

------
donmb
Awesome! Would be super cool if the map could be zoomed so I can try to catch
pictures of my region :)

~~~
callumprentice
Yep - had a couple of requests for that and will work on it later today - good
idea - thank you.

------
dvtrn
This is so cool! Thanks for sharing and great job to you both, some great
wallpaper worthy shots here

~~~
callumprentice
Again - thank you for the kind comments - we both really appreciate it.

------
Kagerjay
related, but I made something similar too for a nasa hackathon a few years
back

[https://nasa-space-app-2018.herokuapp.com/](https://nasa-space-
app-2018.herokuapp.com/)

~~~
callumprentice
Very nice - I entered the original version of this in the 2015 Apps Challenge.

~~~
Kagerjay
Ah yeah we forked the codebase here and added NASA's api to it basically

[https://github.com/cambecc/earth](https://github.com/cambecc/earth)

------
tvalentius
This looks great! How do you divide the tasks with your daughter?

~~~
callumprentice
Someone asked that elsewhere too and noted I didn't have anything up on the
bout page - I'll fix that.

She came up with the design after struggling with an earlier version I made
(also on my site) and wanted it to be easier for her to "find pretty shots" \-
she sketched out some ideas - didn't care for the globe, and I wrote the code
mostly. She expressed some interest in the idea of lat/lng and how it can be
used to specify a position anywhere on earth. It was so much fun and the combo
of JavaScript and a browser is so easy to work with and has instant results.

------
iopuy
What is the standard tool the industry uses to analyze pictures like this? I
see these are JPEG's, that can't be the best format for this type of data, is
it?

~~~
wcarey
JPEG is good for display. If you want to do any sort of analysis on the image,
you'll want a lossless format that can handle multiple channels and the
georeferencing metadata. TIFF is pretty good for that. There are a bunch
depending on what sensor you're getting them from and what you plan on doing
with them. And how sensitive you are to having a pallet of hard drives fed-
exed to your office.

GDAL ([https://gdal.org](https://gdal.org)) is a wonderful tool that can
handle essentially any geographic raster image imaginable. Tools like ArcGis
or Grass can also deal pretty well with hyperspectral images. Lots of GIS
shops also roll very customized image pipelines if they have particular needs.

------
jowdones
Cool. After like 5 random clicks, all I get is black as the bottom images.
Eventually the bottom right says "unable to load this image".

~~~
callumprentice
Yeah - it seems to struggle serving up images sometimes sadly. Sorry - I don't
think there is anything I can do except perhaps add some kind of loading...
graphic.

------
feiss
Amazing. Very convenient, it's so cool to browse such an incredible catalog so
easy.. great job guys, thanks for sharing!

~~~
callumprentice
So pleased you found it useful - thanks for taking the time to comment.

------
pizza
There are some truly incredible photos there..

~~~
callumprentice
Please do post the great ones - I'm making a collection.

------
rmelhem
I had a great time exploring randomly some places, our planet is too beautiful
seen from above.

~~~
callumprentice
It really is isn't it.. I hope to see it one day in person but I think that
option is rapidly diminishing for me at least - perhaps my daughter.

------
heavyset_go
I want to check this out, but it's crashing on Firefox 77.0.1 on Linux. Seems
cool though!

~~~
callumprentice
Is there anything in the console to indicate what went wrong? Happy to fix it
if I can.

~~~
heavyset_go
Looks like it was a low memory issue on my part. Cool site!

------
rory_isAdonk
I smiled big time

------
spookyuser
Very Cool!

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GeorgePler
Nice!

