The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

If it were clear, and dark, and there were no streetlights

...this app might be fun. CityLab explains:

Floating in space among the stars and planets are more than 2,250 satellites and “space junk” traveling at up to 18,000 miles an hour. Some are large enough to be seen with the naked eye—though you’d have to first figure out which ones are within your line of sight.

Luckily, there’s a map for that now, by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo, a graphics engineer at Mapzen who has a knack for turning pure data into mesmerizing visuals (like this one of New York City). His latest project, Line of Sight, traces the orbital path of more than a thousand of those satellites and predicts their current location using open-source data from tracking sites like CelesTrak andSatNogs. Plug in your address (or choose one of the pre-selected cities) to see if there are any satellites—shown as yellow dots—nearby. Or zoom out to watch all the satellites orbit the Earth at once in a dazzling visualization.

His city visualizer is also really cool.

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