Grabbing a NOAA weather satellite download

NOAA has a set of older LEO weather satellites that send an analog signal of the the sensor data they receive, one line at a time, and these are easily listenable with modest equipment. I picked up this image from NOAA 18 this morning, just by chance (I had just come in from listening to the ISS repeater and happened to leave the SDR listening on 137MHz). Recording via SDRSharp, WFM modulation, 35kHz bandwidth, gain at 30-40dB with a short vertical monopole indoors. Decoded with the appropriately named https://noaa-apt.mbernardi.com.ar/

Image of Chicago's South Side with Synthetic Aperture Radar

This is from Sentinel-1 taken on March 22nd, 2021.

1st Starlink sightings

I just caught the end tail of a pass of Starlink satellites. I haven't really tried to see them, but it was clear tonight and we had a convenient pass of a constellation of them. They were all from the Nov 11th 2019 launch and were brighter than predicted (3.0)--looked like about Mag 2 to me--but I wasn't checking very hard. Something like 5 in a row--had I started watching earlier would have seen 12. The chain I saw started with Starlink-1051, then 1012, 1026, 1013, 1009, and finished with 1015.

Image received from the International Space Station

I received an image that was being transmitted from the International Space Station as it passed nearly overhead this evening. They broadcast at about 25W of power at 145.800 MHz; an amount that is easily heard and received since the communication is line-of-sight and only a few hundred miles away. They only use it on occasion so it was nice to hear they were planning on a few days of sending images. I used a generic SDR receiver and a simple dipole and piped the audio output to MMSSTV. Some of the noise in the center of the image was because I forgot to correct the receiver for the Doppler shift of the ISS as it passed by.

Burning Man in Synthetic Aperture Radar

I downloaded the Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar data of the Black Rock area taken on August 19, and the start of Burning Man work is apparent. The colors represent different polarizations of the returns. This is a very small subset of the original 25000x16000 pixel image.

Also found this one from the 24th (horizontally flipped to correct)

Evening passes for the ISS (International Space Station) and the Shuttle in Chicago

A number of visible passes for Chicago this week:

http://www.heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544&lat=41.781312&lng=-87.605097&loc=Chicago&alt=0&tz=CST

Today's sunny and windy weather

Click to enlarge to medium size. The link below goes to the really big image.
Today's weather in Chicago as seen from above via the MODIS imager on the Terra satellite. It was sunny and very windy with winds out of the southwest. It looks like you can see some dust streamers coming out off the lakeshore. Click on the link below for the huge 5200x6000 image with 250m resolution.

http://ge.ssec.wisc.edu/modis-today/index.php?satellite=t1&product=true_color&date=2010_09_07_250&overlay_sector=false&overlay_state=false&overlay_coastline=true§or=USA3&resolution=250m

Credits: http://ge.ssec.wisc.edu/modis-today/credits.html

ISS passes for the next ten days for Chicago

http://www.heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544&lat=41.781312&lng=-87.605097&loc=Chicago&alt=0&tz=CST

November ISS sightings in Chicago

You can see the International Space Station in Chicago in the evening for the rest of the month. If schedules hold, you will also be able to see the Space Shuttle as it docks with the ISS, as the Shuttle should launch on the 16th.
Here's the next 10 days.

Early September ISS Shuttle passes in Chicago

See the International Space Shuttle and the Shuttle together in orbit here in Chicago:

http://www.heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544&lat=41.781312&lng=-87.605097&loc=Chicago&alt=0&tz=CST

ISS/Shuttle passes are over in Chicago

If you are searching for ISS and Shuttle passes over Chicago, tonight's was the last one for a while. If you are an early morning person, mid August will work; if not, early September is the next time you can see the ISS in Chicago.

ISS through a telescope

I just watched an awesome pass of the International Space Station over Chicago. I was able to catch it and follow* the ISS through a telescope at about 50x: the space station appeared as an eagle with orange solar panel wings, with a white body and a small white point source on the main axis. It was excellent, and that was at low power! Here was Tyrell's approach three years ago.

*follow in the sense of every twenty seconds moving a giant dome, followed by a german equatorial telescope in advance of the ISS and hoping I wasn't too slow.

Evening passes of the ISS visible in Chicago

There are a number of nice passes of the International Space Station visible in Chicago for the next two weeks. Take a look at Heavens-Above for the set for Chicago.

Here are the highlights for the evening passes, when they begin, how bright they are, and how high in the sky; click on the link above to get the full details. In some cases you will be able to see the ISS on successive orbits.

6 Jul -2.6 21:42:04 31
6 Jul -1.3 23:17:17 29
7 Jul -3.2 22:06:11 76
8 Jul -2.6 20:55:50 32
8 Jul -1.1 22:31:06 29
9 Jul -3.1 21:19:57 72
10 Jul -1.0 21:44:51 28
11 Jul -2.9 20:33:38 69
12 Jul -0.9 20:58:31 27

Kayuga impact and the videos you should watch

The Japanese Space Agency JAXA just deorbited their lunar orbiting spacecraft Kayuga.

Watch this, this, this (embedded below), or this, turn on the HD for sure, and raise a toast to the mission.



UPDATE: Oh heck, you should see one taken from the ISS while passing over Japan. Again, don't forget to hit the HD version.

What is going on with the Herschel and Planck missions?

The European Space Agency launched an ambitious set of satellites a few days ago: Herschel is a 3.5m diameter infrared telescope, and Planck is a cosmic microwave background telescope. Both are planned to be placed in one of Earth's Lagrangian points called L2. Upon launch such large objects can be tracked with optical telescope for a while. Upon examining these images, astronomers found not two objects, but at first four, which turned out to be the booster rocket and the structure holding both satellite while launching (see here). But later, they found two more fainter objects. These objects have seemingly moved off of the Herschel/Planck trajectory. What were they? The other more disturbing news came today, when Jean-Claude Pelle of Southern Stars Observatories reported finding dozens of new objects in the same path. This implies a possible failure of one or more of the telescopes and would be a blow to science.

ISS passes for Chicago

UPDATE 7/06/2009: Here's the current set of passes.

There are another set of convenient evening passes of the International Space Station over Chicago until the end of the month. Last night we watched it streak across the sky in five minutes from Ryerson. Through the telescope at low power it was two blazing white ovoids with two small orange dots on one of the white blobs.

SO2 plume from Galapagos volcanic eruption

You can see the sulfur dioxide (SO2) plume from the Galapagos volcanic eruption via the OMI on the Aura satellite (which I'm using to watch for hopefully great sunsets here):


NOAA/NESDIS/NASA-Goddard -- Click to enlarge to global view

Satellite collision: story to watch for future complications

Two satellites collided in orbit two days ago, creating a spray of debris that will have to be closely watched to avoid further collisions. One satellite was an Iridium, one of the 88 or so in orbit (I see it was #33), and the other was a non-functioning Russian Cosmos satellite. I hope the Cosmos had either ejected the nuclear reactor that some of them use or was non-nuclear. I see another nuclear Cosmos had a problem recently. What's interesting about this collision was the height: at 490 miles, the debris is fairly high enough to have some significant lifetime. As debris densities increase, chances of collision greatly increase, greatly increasing debris densities, increasing collisions, which... you get the idea. These sort of things are really bad for our near Earth environment.

Here's a graph of the two orbits. It was a bad high energy collision.

UPDATE: Animation of the two satellites colliding (in a virtual sense).

Just morning visibility for Shuttle in Chicago

The current Space Shuttle mission is only visible in Chicago in the early morning. It will dock with the ISS on day three, so here's the Shuttle visibility for the next few days: http://www.heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=32699&lat=41.781312&lng=-87.605097&loc=Chicago&alt=0&tz=CST
After that, use the ISS orbit to see them combined (they'll be docked for about 11 days):
http://www.heavens-above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544&lat=41.781312&lng=-87.605097&loc=Chicago&alt=0&tz=CST

UPDATE 3/18/2009: Take a look here for current Shuttle passes.

USA 193: it won't come down immediately

There is a big misconception in the media reports about the attempted kinetic attack on USA 193 that may happen tomorrow night: it won't come down immediately after being shot. Instead, the fragments of the satellite will continue to orbit. Atmospheric drag will greatly increase on each fragment, but it's certainly not coming down immediately over Canada as everyone says. At least some of the commenters on this Wired blog mention that.

But, it appears its perigee is at the northernmost part of its orbit (if I'm reading the orbital elements right), which is right after the interception. I bet they are thinking an orbit or two later it will come down over the northern Pacific.