Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

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One famous historical version of this was the live video feed from the Apollo 11 moon landing.

There was a direct video feed, but that was being transmitted to Australia (facing the Moon at the time), and it wasn't possible to patch that directly through to US-compatible video feeds. The first images that Nasa received were upside down. The ultimate video, broadcast live internationally, was from a camera pointed at the CRT / television image at Honeysuckle Creek, near Canbera, ACT, Australia.

I'm having trouble finding a full retelling of this though here's a story of Honeysuckle Creek's role and a bit about the TV image:

<https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-19/nasa-apollo-11-moon-l...>

On the Parkes dish (Aus): <https://apollo11.csiro.au/the-australian-connection/live-fro...>.

The wind problem: <https://apollo11.csiro.au/the-australian-connection/delay-an...>.

More on the technical aspects of the video feed, but without my "camera-on-a-TV-screen" bit: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=tIogywOrv8s>

I hate it when the TV signal is upside down because it is coming from Australia!

I just want to note that I'd successfully resisted the temptation you could not.

That is all.

(And to spoil the joke: the inverted image actually originated from the Goldstone station in Southern California, not Oz.)

I was very surprised you didn’t make some comment about it! It had to be going through every reader’s mind. Happy to provide that comedic release for those readers.

In other Apollo landing light Australian humour related links: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205873/

.. featuring the brilliant hack of when stumped by hand solving parametric differential orbital calculations for orientating a radio telescope to the current module position: Just aim it at the moon

( Also; Landline Australia looks at the Danish FarmDroid bot (and names Australian contacts for reviewing such tech)

https://thetvdb.com/series/landline/episodes/10668842

Geolocked Free to Air episode: https://iview.abc.net.au/show/landline/series/2024/video/RF2... (needs an AU proxy)

https://www.youtube.com/@FarmDroid/videos

)

Oh wow thank you for sharing the farm droid links!

And “aim it at the moon” hah yeah. The Dish looks cool! I hadn’t heard of it I will give it a watch.

I figured you might have run across FarmDroid before, they've had a "complete" demo video for the model tested here up for three years or so.

It appears to be a 'dumb' (but accurate) weeding and seeding solar powered battery backed "runs all day and much of the night" platform.

I say dumb as the major feature seems to be highly accurate (sub inch) positioning ( I'm guessing on site grounded in GPS differential base station as an error broadcast | local reference ) with a taunt bright red bit of heavy string sprung out around the four corners .. ie no vision processing and a simple "detect tree or human" stop moving trip wire.

It'll seed, remember seed positions and "weed" (disturb soil) about the remembered seed position .. but I'm guessing it'll weed out planted seeds if there's an origin or axis positioning error in re-calibration.

Still, it's being used in several countries - the 58 minute weekly Landline program devotes 10 or 12 minutes to it and the name is given of the Queensland(?) Ag. Dept. officer who's trialing it out (along with other systems).

That'd be the main point of interest for you if you ever get to wanting to officially test your rig in Australia.

Landline is free to view in Australia - it's just yt-dlp.exe that-url-I-gave-above with an AU proxy .. I can always drop it or just the relevant transcript if want either the .MKV or .SRT

Risky on HN, but you took that risk and we are all grateful.

The Coriolis Effect at work...

I hear the go around the other way down there.

Also, the TV image was "slow scan" at 10 frames per second, which meant that some conversion was inevitable and using a long-retention phosphor TV was a very effective pre-digital solution.

The Dish (2000) is a pretty fun fictional (I assume) account of the Parkes team.

It’s a silly/stupid joke but I’ve been able to make it at 2 different companies courting an Australian client: I add in (and I can’t remember the exacts) a “translate 180 degrees” to the css of the body of the webpage as say “ok, I think are ready to demo”.

> Canbedra

Or as we like to call our nations capital, Canberra.

Yeah, typo, and well past the edit window.

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