ISS passes on Twitter
Via the Royal Observatory Greenwich blog, I learn that London-based Paul Mison has created a twitter feed that tells you when the International Space Station will pass over London. I don't live in London, but I can see this being quite useful for those that do, especially if you forget to look at Heavens Above regularly. The feed also gives details of Iridium flares. There is an equivalent feed for San Francisco but currently no other cities.
Comments: ISS passes on Twitter
This is a terrific idea - customized alerts that could be received by mobile, say, 10 minutes prior to a pass to give one time for dark-eye adaption. It would be a kick to get an alert while out with friends, glance up at the right time, point, and say - there's the ISS. Or the Hubble, or Genesis. Set it so users could specify their location, flag what they'd like to be alerted to, how much prior warning they want.
Calsky.com already does something like this - it even allows you to schedule alerts by calendar - but they only send out one e-mail daily with a list of all events for that day. It would be mighty nice to get them on a just-in-time basis.
I tried commenting on it at Paul's blog, but visitors are forced to join Vox merely to comment - rather offputting. So I didn't.
Posted by DeafScribe on Tuesday 14th Aug 2007 (01:31 UTC)
I just found your Twitter account, and came over here to find you'd noticed AboveLondon and AboveSF; thanks for mentioning them here.
Extending the concept to other cities, and more personalised cutoff levels for flare brightness, are both things we've thought of, but they're hard to do using Twitter as the alert mechanism- it's best suited to broadcast. If nothing else, hopefully this will alert (pun unintended) the existing sites to the potential of just-in-time messaging.
Posted by Paul Mison on Monday 20th Aug 2007 (12:42 UTC)
Just to follow up on Paul's comment (Hi! I'm his wife and the evil mastermind of AboveLondon)...we implemented this idea as basically a quick hack during the HackLondon weekend.
We put about an evening's worth of concentrated effort into it after I had a flash of inspiration while watching an ISS flyby earlier this summer. Basically, it's a quick hack. We'd love to extend it, but we'd need access to a proper SMS gateway which == money we don't have.
I think people are paying attention though, at least in some places, so I am hoping this will inspire a next generation service that will cater to any location and configuration.
Also, I'd like to extend our notifications at some point to do things like add in aurora activity alerts. I also feel like I should manually feed through some things, like how I utterly failed to send through a Perseids notification. Oh well.
Anyway, it's a work in progress, but it's already brought us a great deal of joy.
Posted by candace on Wednesday 22nd Aug 2007 (11:37 UTC)
Candice and Paul, thanks for leaving your comments. I think it is a great idea (that is why I mentioned it). Good luck with developing it.
For aurora alerts you could try catching AuroraWatch which also has an RSS feed.
Posted by Stuart on Wednesday 22nd Aug 2007 (17:35 UTC)