Starship Asterisk*

I remember one of the Apollo's moon lander camera was pointed at the Sunfor just a moment and POOF....died

Our slow bandwidth can't handle the streaming video, but once in a while we do get a beautiful (and literally moving) image.

Thank you APOD!

Grey!!!.......all day long!!!

10:45 pm. Cloud covered ocean on the North-East side of Australia.

Guest wrote:Grey!!!.......all day long!!!

I spot checked maybe 15 times over the last 24 hours, and never saw anything but a live stream of gray.

I think I'll wait until the system is a bit more robust (if ever) before revisiting this one!

What are the rapidly incrementing numbers at the bottom of the screen?
JOhn

JohnD wrote:What are the rapidly incrementing numbers at the bottom of the screen?

Amazing. I'm actually seeing something for the first time!

(My guess is that the first number is the count of current viewers of the stream, the second is the total number of views/stream connections since they started up.)

If you are seeing grey / black screens check this page first. If the ISS is in the dark, it's normal. If it's in the light, there is a much higher chance of seeing something.

Edit: I have noticed that right when it enters the light there is a good chance of gray screen. 5-15 of minutes of gray and then the feed becomes active again. I think that a camera is not functioning and it is a camera being used to look at sunrises.

The ISS needs a color wheel

At just about 2:40 pm, it just went into darkness and the moon was showing for about a minute or so. Looked kinda small on that big black screen. Haven't been able to catch it over land in the daytime, as yet.

Do we have white water on this planet? I always seem to catch the ISS over water, but it's never blue. So far it's always white. Where the heck is the blue stuff??

YEA! I finally got to see land. Don't know exactly what land, just east of the middle east somewhere. And I didn't see any clouds, but did see some snow cover.

This view has been long available from the N2YO website, where the camera image is alongside a map of the current ISS position.
That should help you orientate yourself with the view from space
http://www.n2yo.com/space-station/

Of course the site offers tracking information about many other satellites.
John

Thanks for that link, JohnD. That page is very nice and has much of the additional info that I think enhances the experience.

Oddly enough, I watched the tracking move from over the water to over land, indeed hundreds of miles from any ocean (over South America), and still the live feed showed clouds and blue. Unless something else is going on, uhhh ... why does terra firma appear blue?

MarkBour wrote:Oddly enough, I watched the tracking move from over the water to over land, indeed hundreds of miles from any ocean (over South America), and still the live feed showed clouds and blue. Unless something else is going on, uhhh ... why does terra firma appear blue?

It doesn't always. But when it does, it's for the same reason the sky is blue: the atmosphere scatters blue light. And it scatters it upwards as readily as down, so it is common for the ground to have a blue cast. If that landscape is relatively unvegetated, and there is dust in the air, it can appear extremely blue.

i'm looking for an active forum that shares hdev status updates and especially educational cloud patterns.

when hdev first got running, there was a predictable cycle of the four camera views. this has since been abandoned and you never know what you'll get-- the nadir cam almost never shows up anymore, and the others display for much longer periods.

the yellow 'field of view' circle on the esa worldmap needs additional yellow arc-patches to show the cams' fields of view to scale-- they're a lot smaller than you'd expect.

some notes: http://robotwisdom.neocities.org/iss.html

(if you know a little html, embedding their iframes is trivial and very much more convenient.)

I started a Twitter account for my HDEV questions
https://twitter.com/HDEVpro

Beyond wrote:YEA! I finally got to see land. Don't know exactly what land, just east of the middle east somewhere. And I didn't see any clouds, but did see some snow cover.

If I didn't know better, I'd wonder if this planet had any land at all, as I STILL haven't seen anything but white and blue.

Ya just have to catch it at the right time and place and hope it's not cloudy, if ya wants to see some good ol terra firma.

Use the dual view so you can see where the ISS is, or about to come to. That'll give you a good idea of your best chance to see land on the other viewer.

Beyond wrote:Ya just have to catch it at the right time and place and hope it's not cloudy, if ya wants to see some good ol terra firma.

Use the dual view so you can see where the ISS is, or about to come to. That'll give you a good idea of your best chance to see land on the other viewer.

Yeah, I need a better plan than just random chance. Checking this website too should improve the odds http://iss.astroviewer.net/
It shows both were it is (on the top) and whether it’s in the dark or not (on the bottom of the page).

Bruce

Just got a glimps of western S. America, (the least cloudy area on the planet?) so, yes, there really is land on Earth