I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house
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To answer a question I saw pop up, I am using the FAA aircraft registration data to pull up the extra information about the planes. It lists who actually owns the plane, vs who is operating it. That is why you see so many banks. Places like Flightaware have much better data, but a pricy to look up.
Can you please share more details on that docker image setup?
A number of planes fly low and when I check flightaware, they're not on it. Or there's a plane that could be it, but it's flight path is heading East to West 30 miles North of me, while this plane came from the South heading North. Also, pretty much once a month or so, a pair of A10 Warthogs fly over or near our house. Last month, we had a real treat with 4 of them directly over the house, better than an air show.
So I'd like to setup 4 cameras on my tower focused skyward and have them try to catch clips of planes. I'll be looking at your work to see if I can also match those with flightaware.
People often think an aircraft is flying with transponder off because it doesn't appear on FR24/FlightAware. In fact these companies allow blocking aircraft from their service; this is why ADS-B Exchange is better.
Surveillance aircraft, if operated by a government entity, would not be required to transmit anyway. (Though they may choose to for safety purposes if it doesn't compromise the mission, just as the military often do in busy airspace.)
Recently there was a post of Google satellite cameras capturing a B-2 Stealth Bomber showing up on Google Maps [1]. Would such planes be captured by a vision system only, and would that be of concern to the government that might be trying to keep it undetected?
1: https://www.google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B001%2718.5%22N+93%C...
Here is the HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627105
Here's a Techradar post on this: https://www.techradar.com/news/eagle-eyed-redditor-spots-a-f...
I'm sure some people don't like the noise, but I love seeing the planes so close.
If they are flying without ADS-B (which is legal for the military when needed) they won't be picked up by this system so no filtering needed.
https://www.aviationtoday.com/2019/07/23/new-rule-allows-mil...
Not just because of the potential safety issue, but because of how easy it is to track you.
In many areas, they have Wide Area Multilateration equipment installed that will show the real location of the transmitter, instead of the fake GPS coordinates you transmit. Normally it's there to double-check the ADS-B coordinates are correct, to track older planes without ADS-B, and to give true altitude readings, but it will track illegal transmitters as a side effect.
Even in areas where they haven't installed a permanent MLAT system, they usually have some sort of equipment that can track down a 1090MHz transponder. For-example, search and rescue planes often carry one.
The FlightAware API I was using (they have multiple) didn't provide all the data I wanted either. The ADSB Exchange Rapid API was more comprehensive, but came at a cost.
The aircraft don't broadcast everything over ADSB - so these sites are all pulling from a database somewhere else. It appears ADSB Exchange and some of the pi based UIs use the tar1090-db. This was easy to work with and free - just need to update it periodically due to registration changes.
Because it's a telescope, it's designed to be aligned at night. It's more of a pain to do during the day (such as for an eclipse or I guess tracking planes). But there's no reason you couldn't align it to stars at night and it will its alignment pretty precisely. I'm not sure how much drift there is in that over say 24+ hours though. It's also smart enough with the Celestron controller to never point at the sun even during a slew. I'm not sure if it has that same safety feature when controlled from a computer, which would be a major concern with daytime use.
But a 6" f/10 (so ~1500mm lens) telescope with a full frame camera is still a 1° field of view so the same as you have now. Smaller sensor would be tighter field of view.
And of course the obvious drawback: None of this setup would be weatherproof
Alignment has been a big pain for me. I might actually have to look at how to use stars to correctly position everything.
I was always worried about making it a public data source. Kinda seems like it could be potentially dangerous, but that’s completely paranoid speculation. Thanks for sharing!
I got all the camera gear on ebay, which was lucky.
I figure since it is all based on ADS-B data, there isn't anything too crazy about making it public. I am also still trying to figure out if it is actually useful for anything... besides getting unlimited plane photos!
The only non-public information you're making available is the approximate location of your house!
It's a very high end approach to planespotting though. People used to just tick off serial numbers in books :D
This is seriously one of the most fun and inventive projects I've seen. Such ingenuity at every stage of this pipeline. I didn't even realize they made cameras like this.
Bravo! Please keep it up!
Back in my day, everyone’s address was listed in the phone book. If you wanted to remain anonymous, you had to pay a service charge to keep yourself from being listed!
Of course, your tax forms are documents touched by the government, in which your declared income is stated.
And now those articles are searchable on newspapers.com!
I do have to admit it was fun finding my mom's old Red Cross activities and my dad's chess tournaments. Any chess players remember Sammy Reshevsky? He was a friend of my dad's and would sometimes stay with us when he visited Eugene for a chess tournament.
(and you can of course unlist yourself)
I'm somewhat interested, did it go down differently in e.g. U.S., i.e. are directory services gone, too?
The thing about unbiased random noise is that it cancels itself out! And for the most part, we can compute exactly how many data points are needed to achieve a particular level of precision in the result.
so find intersection of all these planes' paths, then using geometry figure out possible locations, then find their intersections..
- Most planes are passing at over 30,000'
- It's using a Costar RISE 4260 camera /w built in heater
- It leverages SkyScan by IQT labs[0]
- It leverages Azure custom vision API[1]
Also wondering what the stack would look like for a self-hosted version with equivalent or better functionality!
All of the capture stuff just runs on a Raspberry Pi.
HTTPS-everywhere was the second bane of my internet existence when I lived in China.
I don’t know how it is now but a decade ago you basically couldn’t access anything on https.
You can direct the antenna precisely because you have the image recognition in addition to GPS.
Would it be easier to get an astronomy mount and control it programmatically?
We’ve got one detecting planes on the ground but not yet in the air! https://universe.roboflow.com/gdit/aerial-airport
> The Function uses a model trained in Azure Custom Vision to detect if there is an airplane in the photo and where it is
I built some scripts to also start building a model that can classify the different aircraft models. One of the interesting things with this, is that you get really accurate labels... probably better than what a human could do for images of this size.
1: https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/d7eddj/4chan-does-first-...
I'm worried about lasing an airplane (I am not too close to the airport but not that far either) and was thinking about hooking up an ADS-B receiver to tell the system to keep the beam away from airplanes, even if they are on the other side of the cloud deck.
A system like that, funny enough, is supposed to get approval from the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) because the FDA regulates lasers. If aircraft are involved the FDA asks the FAA what they think about it. I'd hope that they think that protective system would be good enough.
Not to say it couldn’t be done, given the right approvals. You’d possibly be asked to publish a NOTAM to tell aircraft to stay away. The FAA has a publication on this very topic:
https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...
They most certainly won't. Peruse this site if interested. Long story short, the kind of wattage you're talking about (writing on clouds visible from the ground) is incredibly dangerous, not just to airplanes but to those on the ground, and you would have to demonstrate through licenses and permits that you know what you're doing. I don't think $50k will get you even halfway there, if possible at all in any kind of urban center.
https://www.laserpointersafety.com/rules-general/cdrh-conseq...
US cities and surrounding areas have turned into air traffic hell.
Loud, low-frequency noise is particularly awful and is basically inescapable 24/7.
NextGen seems to have made things much worse since 2015 or so.
Are you able to open source this setup and guide us thru some of the details? Your idea/implementation would actually help change the world into a better place.
I bet you had much better aircraft flying out of Hong Kong!!
I listened to the plane landing that my older children were on when coming to visit me.
What amazes me about your project is to put focus on things we take for granted going over our heads all the time.
I remember starting a similar project years ago when I got my first RTL-SDR adapter - didn't get too far, but probably cheaper than this setup https://web.archive.org/web/20160228105159/http://simonaubur...
Wilmington Trust, Bank of Utah, Wells Fargo, “UMB Bank” (?), US Bank. Is it really the case that a quarter of US air traffic is rich people in suits who are too good for Zoom? :)
Edit: answered here, I believe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30041181
Look at a normal vehicle title it will say {Bank} financing division. NEVER "trust"
This approach is even better!
Ubiquiti’s UniFi Protect app uses a similar UI for ‘smart detections’ and it’s really very nicely done / looks like you’ve achieved the same quality of cropping and layout in the snapshots. Bravo. So much potential for this. Good luck with it!
Edit: related, I regularly commuted by plane between two cities, and my parents live out in the country part way between the two. I could regularly see their house out the window of my plane, because by chance one of the flight lanes was just north of them. So they would have have a lot of traffic going overhead, despite being nowhere near an airport. They also have less frequent planes go by on great circle routes to europe, which is probably what you're imagining thinking about seeing planes infrequently.
Aircraft get laserd relatively often and it's dangerous to the pilots. We report it to air traffic control with an estimated location, they then coordinate with the police.
Common practice is to turn off exterior lights when lasered, because it's just bored people with a laser pointer and they can't aim when the plane has no lights on. But if you link it to ADS-B that would require switching off the transponder which will cause issues for ATC.
I was thinking it would be good for rebels in Africa or the Middle East who get attacked by nation state actors.
This is a low cost anti air deterrent and monitoring system, that can operate remotely, and autonomously.
Don’t poor people have the right to not be bombed?
Yeah, pretty much. But for short we just call it “planespotting” in the hobby community ;)
This question is also handy at hackathons. Sometimes you get an answer like, "nope", other times you get anti-government screeds, sometimes dreams of saving the world once they've scaled up.
Personally, I find it better not to ask and to just enjoy the hack.