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

Wonderful.

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.

Great service! All it took to find these less beautiful pictures of Germany was the rough location from google maps entered in the url:

https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer_fla...

It shows why Germans still burn coal in their houses. A lot of closeups of the surface mining of coal outside Cologne.

Brilliant - I wa hoping it might be a good way to share interesting photos like this - thank you.

Having a chat over a beer some years later: 'so I was taking some pictures when the kernel crashed..400km above the earth'...

Stable link: 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.)

Yeah, I tried to select the Bay Area and had a bit of a difficult time doing so :(

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.

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.

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.

It's not a new pattern though.

Before they've done it for telemetry and identifying which initiative this click is from. Nowadays it's just that they're redirecting the default route to a particular site after, so they could potentially switch the site they redirect to later.

While a small annoyance to mobile users which go there from sites like hn, it does give the owner of the site a tiny amount of control where ppl end up on their site.

At least that's my interpretation...

I sent a PR to fix this.

https://github.com/callumprentice/callumprentice.github.io/p...

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.

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.

Agreed - that was spectacular.

What's wrong with wanting to paint and sculpt clay?

Your daughter sounds awesome, is there a problem with her being an artist?

She loves doing things with me so when I suggested we have a crack at it, she was all for it. If I'd said let's go eat worms in the garden, she'd probably said the same thing.

First, there is no dichotomy between art and computer. One can like both and learn both. Unfortunately, once someone sees dichotomy, not knowing or liking that other stuff can become identity. Not sure if you met "I can not be artistic/social because I am technical" thing, but opposite "I can not like tech cause I see myself artistic or social" exist too.

I agree that there is nothing wrong with being artist, but it is absolutely normal and ok for parent to want to show good in other things. Artistic parents are also teaching their kids to like art and that is good. She does not have to become programmer, but hating computers for being computers will harm and limit her.

So, I think that talking to her about what she likes and dislikes, why and how the school approach is putting her off could help. If her distaste is because of school, it would be good to help her separate thing (computer), skill (ability to do stuff with it) and the way they force it on her in school. If she has bad feelings about even touching computer, talking, asking questions and listening helps. Ask questions and listen more, talk less.

Also, most of professional drawing is done on computer or tablet these days. Sometimes seeing that the technical is not separate from what you like and can be integral to it can help overcome the hate. If she is watching youtube videos artists make, she must have seen that. There are also easy to use apps that help you make stop motion videos from photos, funny animated stories, 3d modeling and so on. Some of these could help her overcome the dislike. Yet also, making pics of her art, putting it on webpage is something artist might find useful.

The point there is that there is not line between computer and art, just a skill you can acquire and use creatively.

Also, my daughter had periods where she seen computer related things as boy things (to my great annoyance) and avoided them. Or where she concluded she is naturally bad, because basically someone else knew a little bit more so the other kid looked more talented. There, explaining that it is learnable and showing her how little effort it took to learn more helped a lot.

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.

It's Diamond Head

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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 ?

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

Again - thank you for the kind comments - we both really appreciate it.

Very nice - I entered the original version of this in the 2015 Apps Challenge.

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.

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?

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) 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.

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.

So pleased you found it useful - thanks for taking the time to comment.

Please do post the great ones - I'm making a collection.

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.

Is there anything in the console to indicate what went wrong? Happy to fix it if I can.