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Show HN: My daughter and I made a site to explore the photos from the ISS

528 points by callumprentice 6y ago

pcnix 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
caiobegotti 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Yeah, I tried to select the Bay Area and had a bit of a difficult time doing so :(
  - callumprentice 6y ago
    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.
  - callumprentice 6y ago
    You can always manually enter the lat/lng (37.7749, -122.4194) in the URL until I figure a way to make zoom work.
- callumprentice 6y ago
  Thank you and zooming is a great idea that I hadn't considered after the switch from the WebGL globe (which did that of course). I'll add that to the list - thank you.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  I'm not sure about the utility of the whole thing - I think I'd just like to filter the images (bottom two panes) according to the section of the World I'd zoomed in the top pane. I'd have top-left, World map; bottom-left thumbnails; full-page-right current image. So I could zoom to an area of the World, all images that cover that area would be in the thumbnails, select a thumbnail to view. Ideally if zoomed enough then there might be outlines on the World map that show the imaged areas available. Cool idea though.
  - callumprentice 6y ago
    Understood and I like your suggestion. The problem we had trying to preview too much was that pulling the 'small' (still quite large) images off their web server for each lat/lng point seemed to bring it to its' knees. I wish there was a quick way to see a thumbnail - that opens up a bunch of ideas. I considered downloading all 3.5M images (in batches) and converting to 128x128 thumbs to store and serve locally but probably not good form to do that to NASA and my tired old computer would get rather sad I think. Hopefully someone else will be inspired to improve on the idea though.
    - zeristor 6y ago
      I am not a Nastronaut, but I think NASA wold love this project; they’re keen to show off their work and engage with the public as much as possible. Making thumbnails of the images seems like a useful task in itself.
      - callumprentice 6y ago
        Yeah - I reached out to the people listed o nthe main photo page - we'll see if they are able to respond.
dvtrn 6y ago
This is so cool! Thanks for sharing and great job to you both, some great wallpaper worthy shots here
- callumprentice 6y ago
  Again - thank you for the kind comments - we both really appreciate it.
yellow_lead 6y ago
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/ISS052-E-14914.jpg https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/DatabaseImages/ESC/large/ISS052/ISS...
- sci_prog 6y ago
  It's Diamond Head
  - cipherzero 6y ago
    Yes here is the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Head,_Hawaii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Head,_Hawaii
    - callumprentice 6y ago
      Fantastic - as per earlier comment, I'm thrilled people can share interesting images like this.
ryanisnan 6y ago
Amazing creation! How old is your daughter? Very cool project for the two of you.
- callumprentice 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      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 :)
feiss 6y ago
Amazing. Very convenient, it's so cool to browse such an incredible catalog so easy.. great job guys, thanks for sharing!
- callumprentice 6y ago
  So pleased you found it useful - thanks for taking the time to comment.
jowdones 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
rosstex 6y ago
Where's the blog post with photos of your daughter! Aside, excellent work!
- bowmessage 6y ago
  Are you intentionally trying to be creepy or just tonedeaf?
  - rosstex 6y ago
    LOL, c'mon guys. That was a parody of comments, and software engineers who really do make such posts. I like to think I am not a creep, thanks.
    - klyrs 6y ago
      You might not think of yourself as a creep, but your comment was indinstinguishable from that of a creep. To the young woman in question, you are just another dude who sees her as a sex object. It doesn't matter if you thought it was a joke; you're a part of the problem. > I like to think I am not a creep, thanks. Then don't fukkin act like one, genius.
- klyrs 6y ago
  And this shit is why we don't have more diversity in tech.
  - rosstex 6y ago
    Well done, you passed the test.
AnonC 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
augustt 6y ago
Very cool. Maybe consider adding a fallback image for the thumbnails while they load since sometimes it takes a while.
- callumprentice 6y ago
  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.
darken 6y ago
Neat! Looks like they had some computer trouble: https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_flat/index.html?lat=47&lng=-109&pn=30&ph=0 https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_fla... (In case the link isn't stable, they photo'd their computer having a kernel panic.)
- callumprentice 6y ago
  Brilliant - I wa hoping it might be a good way to share interesting photos like this - thank you.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  Having a chat over a beer some years later: 'so I was taking some pictures when the kernel crashed..400km above the earth'...
- wolfgang42 6y ago
  Stable link: https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ISS026&roll=E&frame=8810 https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ISS02... (It’d be neat to have the image ID in the explorer link to this page.)
  - callumprentice 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      Added your suggestion since it was easy to do - thank you for the idea.
      - wolfgang42 6y ago
remote_phone 6y ago
I’m getting a “Loading data” page but no indication if the site is working. Has the sudden load taken it down?
- callumprentice 6y ago
  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.
ivanstojic 6y ago
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 6y ago
  I sent a PR to fix this. https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/pull/5 https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/p...
  - callumprentice 6y ago
    Got it and will integrate now - much appreciated and much better than the endless entries. Thank you.
  - sinsterizme 6y ago
    Not everyone has your knowledge and ability
    - corobo 6y ago
      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/pull/5/files https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/p...
      - sinsterizme 6y ago
        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 :)
7373737373 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Agreed - that was spectacular.
  - imjustabill 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      Fantastic and thanks for sharing - I can't wait to take a look. Sounds like a brilliant rainy Sunday afternoon project :)
donmb 6y ago
Awesome! Would be super cool if the map could be zoomed so I can try to catch pictures of my region :)
- callumprentice 6y ago
  Yep - had a couple of requests for that and will work on it later today - good idea - thank you.
iopuy 6y ago
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?
- callumprentice 6y ago
  I would have imagined they capture images with all kinds of visible/non-visibles light too - perhaps this is just the bucket that they dump the images from pr0/consumer devices into?
- wcarey 6y ago
  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.
Kagerjay 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Very nice - I entered the original version of this in the 2015 Apps Challenge.
  - Kagerjay 6y ago
    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
funkypants666 6y ago
ux is bad can i meet your daughter to fix it?
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rory_isAdonk 6y ago
I smiled big time
Chetane 6y ago
That's great! Below are some beautiful captures of aurora borealis: - 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# https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_fla...
- callumprentice 6y ago
  Wonderful.
- callumprentice 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
- Moru 6y ago
callumprentice 6y ago
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.
dddw 6y ago
Wow really great way to explore this! Runs fine on Firefox focus, but not on 'regular' Firefox mobile
- callumprentice 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    "ResizeObserver" is not yet available in Firefox ESR and Firefox Mobile (v68): https://caniuse.com/#feat=resizeobserver https://caniuse.com/#feat=resizeobserver
    - callumprentice 6y ago
      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.
heavyset_go 6y ago
I want to check this out, but it's crashing on Firefox 77.0.1 on Linux. Seems cool though!
- callumprentice 6y ago
  Is there anything in the console to indicate what went wrong? Happy to fix it if I can.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Looks like it was a low memory issue on my part. Cool site!
pizza 6y ago
There are some truly incredible photos there..
- callumprentice 6y ago
  Please do post the great ones - I'm making a collection.
rmelhem 6y ago
I had a great time exploring randomly some places, our planet is too beautiful seen from above.
- callumprentice 6y ago
  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.
coronadisaster 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      Noted - it's not great now and I'll see what I can do to improve it.
aflag 6y ago
Doesn't seem to load in Firefox on my mobile.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tvalentius 6y ago
This looks great! How do you divide the tasks with your daughter?
- callumprentice 6y ago
  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.
eatYourFood 6y ago
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 6y ago
  What's wrong with wanting to paint and sculpt clay?
  - eatYourFood 6y ago
    The most likely outcome with a career in art is living close to poverty.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - AtlasLion 6y ago
      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.
      - rebuilder 6y ago
        The arts as a profession really is one of those things where you should only get into it if you are so driven that you have no choice, IMO. More likely than not, you'll be scraping by in poverty for the rest of your life, seeking validation from funding gatekeepers, compromising your work in the process in order to secure funding to do it in the first place. If you can bear the thought of doing some other work, then getting a decent paycheck and having art as more of a hobby or side venture may be much more fulfilling. (And frankly, most people I know in the arts do all kinds of side jobs to pay the bills, anyway.)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
quickthrower2 6y ago
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/ISS005-E-20717.jpg https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/DatabaseImages/ESC/large/ISS005/ISS.... CBD and Harbour Bridge are covered by clouds.
- callumprentice 6y ago
  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.
markn951 6y ago
Wow, this is way better than the site that other guy made to explore the photos from ISIS
hardright 6y ago
Maybe you should stop brain washing your daughter with these lies. Have you considered showing her the bible?
walrus01 6y ago
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/gallery/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/multimedia/galler... https://images.nasa.gov https://images.nasa.gov an array of thinkpads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad#/media/File:ISS-38_EVA-1_Laptops.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad#/media/File:ISS-38_EV...
- dmurray 6y ago
  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.
  - onetom 6y ago
    it's an international space station though...
    - SenHeng 6y ago
      one where China is banned from participating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_Space_Station#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_...
  - Joeri 6y ago
    They switched to HP ZBooks in 2016. Interesting article listing all the models used: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/from-windows-10-linux-ipads-iphones-to-hololens-the-tech-space-station-astronauts-use/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/from-windows-10-linux-i...
spookyuser 6y ago
Very Cool!
GeorgePler 6y ago
Nice!
numlock86 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
  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.
nocitrek 6y ago
Wait, I thought earth was flat?

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 6y ago
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.

caiobegotti 6y ago

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 6y ago
Yeah, I tried to select the Bay Area and had a bit of a difficult time doing so :(
- callumprentice 6y ago
  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.
- callumprentice 6y ago
  You can always manually enter the lat/lng (37.7749, -122.4194) in the URL until I figure a way to make zoom work.
callumprentice 6y ago
Thank you and zooming is a great idea that I hadn't considered after the switch from the WebGL globe (which did that of course). I'll add that to the list - thank you.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
I'm not sure about the utility of the whole thing - I think I'd just like to filter the images (bottom two panes) according to the section of the World I'd zoomed in the top pane. I'd have top-left, World map; bottom-left thumbnails; full-page-right current image. So I could zoom to an area of the World, all images that cover that area would be in the thumbnails, select a thumbnail to view. Ideally if zoomed enough then there might be outlines on the World map that show the imaged areas available. Cool idea though.
- callumprentice 6y ago
  Understood and I like your suggestion. The problem we had trying to preview too much was that pulling the 'small' (still quite large) images off their web server for each lat/lng point seemed to bring it to its' knees. I wish there was a quick way to see a thumbnail - that opens up a bunch of ideas. I considered downloading all 3.5M images (in batches) and converting to 128x128 thumbs to store and serve locally but probably not good form to do that to NASA and my tired old computer would get rather sad I think. Hopefully someone else will be inspired to improve on the idea though.
  - zeristor 6y ago
    I am not a Nastronaut, but I think NASA wold love this project; they’re keen to show off their work and engage with the public as much as possible. Making thumbnails of the images seems like a useful task in itself.
    - callumprentice 6y ago
      Yeah - I reached out to the people listed o nthe main photo page - we'll see if they are able to respond.

dvtrn 6y ago

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

callumprentice 6y ago
Again - thank you for the kind comments - we both really appreciate it.

yellow_lead 6y ago

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

sci_prog 6y ago
It's Diamond Head
- cipherzero 6y ago
  Yes here is the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Head,_Hawaii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Head,_Hawaii
  - callumprentice 6y ago
    Fantastic - as per earlier comment, I'm thrilled people can share interesting images like this.

ryanisnan 6y ago

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

callumprentice 6y ago
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 6y ago
  > 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 6y ago
    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 :)

feiss 6y ago

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

callumprentice 6y ago
So pleased you found it useful - thanks for taking the time to comment.

jowdones 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.

rosstex 6y ago

Where's the blog post with photos of your daughter! Aside, excellent work!

bowmessage 6y ago
Are you intentionally trying to be creepy or just tonedeaf?
- rosstex 6y ago
  LOL, c'mon guys. That was a parody of comments, and software engineers who really do make such posts. I like to think I am not a creep, thanks.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    You might not think of yourself as a creep, but your comment was indinstinguishable from that of a creep. To the young woman in question, you are just another dude who sees her as a sex object. It doesn't matter if you thought it was a joke; you're a part of the problem. > I like to think I am not a creep, thanks. Then don't fukkin act like one, genius.
klyrs 6y ago
And this shit is why we don't have more diversity in tech.
- rosstex 6y ago
  Well done, you passed the test.

AnonC 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.

augustt 6y ago

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

callumprentice 6y ago
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.

darken 6y ago

Neat! Looks like they had some computer trouble: https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_flat/index.html?lat=47&lng=-109&pn=30&ph=0 https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_fla... (In case the link isn't stable, they photo'd their computer having a kernel panic.)

callumprentice 6y ago
Brilliant - I wa hoping it might be a good way to share interesting photos like this - thank you.
cosmodisk 6y ago
Having a chat over a beer some years later: 'so I was taking some pictures when the kernel crashed..400km above the earth'...
wolfgang42 6y ago
Stable link: https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ISS026&roll=E&frame=8810 https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ISS02... (It’d be neat to have the image ID in the explorer link to this page.)
- callumprentice 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Added your suggestion since it was easy to do - thank you for the idea.
    - wolfgang42 6y ago

remote_phone 6y ago

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

callumprentice 6y ago
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.

ivanstojic 6y ago

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 6y ago
I sent a PR to fix this. https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/pull/5 https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/p...
- callumprentice 6y ago
  Got it and will integrate now - much appreciated and much better than the endless entries. Thank you.
- sinsterizme 6y ago
  Not everyone has your knowledge and ability
  - corobo 6y ago
    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/pull/5/files https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/p...
    - sinsterizme 6y ago
      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 :)

7373737373 6y ago

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 6y ago
Agreed - that was spectacular.
- imjustabill 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Fantastic and thanks for sharing - I can't wait to take a look. Sounds like a brilliant rainy Sunday afternoon project :)

donmb 6y ago

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

callumprentice 6y ago
Yep - had a couple of requests for that and will work on it later today - good idea - thank you.

iopuy 6y ago

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?

callumprentice 6y ago
I would have imagined they capture images with all kinds of visible/non-visibles light too - perhaps this is just the bucket that they dump the images from pr0/consumer devices into?
wcarey 6y ago
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.

Kagerjay 6y ago

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 6y ago
Very nice - I entered the original version of this in the 2015 Apps Challenge.
- Kagerjay 6y ago
  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

funkypants666 6y ago

ux is bad can i meet your daughter to fix it?

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rory_isAdonk 6y ago

I smiled big time

Chetane 6y ago

That's great! Below are some beautiful captures of aurora borealis: - 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# https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_fla...

callumprentice 6y ago
Wonderful.
callumprentice 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
Moru 6y ago

callumprentice 6y ago

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.

dddw 6y ago

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

callumprentice 6y ago
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 6y ago
  "ResizeObserver" is not yet available in Firefox ESR and Firefox Mobile (v68): https://caniuse.com/#feat=resizeobserver https://caniuse.com/#feat=resizeobserver
  - callumprentice 6y ago
    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.

heavyset_go 6y ago

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

callumprentice 6y ago
Is there anything in the console to indicate what went wrong? Happy to fix it if I can.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Looks like it was a low memory issue on my part. Cool site!

pizza 6y ago

There are some truly incredible photos there..

callumprentice 6y ago
Please do post the great ones - I'm making a collection.

rmelhem 6y ago

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

callumprentice 6y ago
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.

coronadisaster 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Noted - it's not great now and I'll see what I can do to improve it.

aflag 6y ago

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

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

tvalentius 6y ago

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

callumprentice 6y ago
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.

eatYourFood 6y ago

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 6y ago
What's wrong with wanting to paint and sculpt clay?
- eatYourFood 6y ago
  The most likely outcome with a career in art is living close to poverty.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - AtlasLion 6y ago
    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.
    - rebuilder 6y ago
      The arts as a profession really is one of those things where you should only get into it if you are so driven that you have no choice, IMO. More likely than not, you'll be scraping by in poverty for the rest of your life, seeking validation from funding gatekeepers, compromising your work in the process in order to secure funding to do it in the first place. If you can bear the thought of doing some other work, then getting a decent paycheck and having art as more of a hobby or side venture may be much more fulfilling. (And frankly, most people I know in the arts do all kinds of side jobs to pay the bills, anyway.)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

quickthrower2 6y ago

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/ISS005-E-20717.jpg https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/DatabaseImages/ESC/large/ISS005/ISS.... CBD and Harbour Bridge are covered by clouds.

callumprentice 6y ago
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.

markn951 6y ago

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

hardright 6y ago

Maybe you should stop brain washing your daughter with these lies. Have you considered showing her the bible?

walrus01 6y ago

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/gallery/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/multimedia/galler... https://images.nasa.gov https://images.nasa.gov an array of thinkpads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad#/media/File:ISS-38_EVA-1_Laptops.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad#/media/File:ISS-38_EV...

dmurray 6y ago
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.
- onetom 6y ago
  it's an international space station though...
  - SenHeng 6y ago
    one where China is banned from participating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_Space_Station#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_...
- Joeri 6y ago
  They switched to HP ZBooks in 2016. Interesting article listing all the models used: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/from-windows-10-linux-ipads-iphones-to-hololens-the-tech-space-station-astronauts-use/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/from-windows-10-linux-i...

spookyuser 6y ago

Very Cool!

GeorgePler 6y ago

Nice!

numlock86 6y ago

> 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 6y ago
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.

nocitrek 6y ago

Wait, I thought earth was flat?