Thursday, February 25, 2010

Live video feed from the International Space Station

This is great; I've been holding off on sharing this because I felt like it was too special to share widely. But here's the deal--there is a live video feed on the International Space Station. And usually it's pointing out at Earth. So literally you can watch the Earth go by live. You can experience sunrise and sunset in orbit. You can see the biggest cities' light pollution on the dark part of the orbit and sun glints of the Pacific or the swirls in the clouds in the Southern Ocean.

Here's the Live ISS video feed. If you stop the video, reload the page rather than restarting the video; otherwise regular NASA TV will start up.

See where the ISS is via http://www.heavens-above.com/orbit.aspx?satid=25544&lat=41.781312&lng=-87.605097&loc=Chicago&alt=0&tz=CST and http://www.n2yo.com
.

There are some parts of the orbit with no video download. It is also sensitive to the TDRSS capacity.

While writing this, I am watching sunrise on the ISS just south of South Africa. It is beautiful.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dean, this is great -- thanks for posting this. I've missed this kind of video on NASA TV, lately. If I remember right, back in the late-90's, NASA TV used to show playback video of the Earth from the Shuttle, even when there was no mission up, and it was great to have in the background. Thanks again. -- John Everett