Tags: satellite

Glittering Blue

Scroll around this massive video of a timelapse of one day’s footage from the Himawari 8 satellite in geostationary orbit around our homeworld.

Securing Web Sites Made Them Less Accessible – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

This is a heartbreaking observation by Eric. He’s not anti-HTTPS by any stretch, but he is pointing out that caching servers become a thing of the past on a more secure web.

Can we do anything? For users of up-to-date browsers, yes: service workers create a “good” man in the middle that sidesteps the HTTPS problem, so far as I understand. So if you’re serving content over HTTPS, creating a service worker should be one of your top priorities right now, even if it’s just to do straightforward local caching and nothing fancier.

Google Maps’s Moat

A fascinating bit of cartographic reverse engineering, looking at how Google has an incredible level of satellite-delivered building detail that then goes into solving the design problem of marking “commercial corridors” (or Areas Of Interest) on their maps.

Orbital Reflector

Art. In. Spaaaaaace!

Orbital Reflector is a sculpture constructed of a lightweight material similar to Mylar. It is housed in a small box-like infrastructure known as a CubeSat and launched into space aboard a rocket. Once in low Earth orbit at a distance of about 350 miles (575 kilometers) from Earth, the CubeSat opens and releases the sculpture, which self-inflates like a balloon. Sunlight reflects onto the sculpture making it visible from Earth with the naked eye — like a slowly moving artificial star as bright as a star in the Big Dipper.

Seeing Earth from Outer Space

A lovely interactive photo essay charting the results of what happens when evolution produces a life form that allows a planet to take selfies.

Stuff in Space

A gorgeous visualisation of satellites in Earth orbit. Click around to grasp the scale of the network.

Temporary Constellations — Buckley Williams

This is a really lovely project by Dan and Nat—Christmas cards featuring the fleeting invisible constellations formed by the mesh of GPS satellites within which our planet lies.

Stratocam

Communal satellite eyes. A Mac screensaver is also available.

The Last Pictures: Contemporary pessimism and hope for the future by Paul Glister

From the cave paintings at Lascaux to the Pioneer plaques and Voyager golden records to Trevor Paglen’s “The Last Pictures” project, Paul Glister examines the passage and preservation of art and information through time. Fascinating.

Or perhaps, as Paglen envisions, those who find a Pioneer Plaque, a Voyager Record, or one of our electromagnetic transmissions will be interested enough to search us out, coming upon a future Earth where all that is left of humanity are our terrestrial ruins and that artificial ring of geosynchronous satellites, with one of them having a particular golden artifact bolted to its pitted hull. In that scenario, about all that would be left for the visiting ETI to do in terms of learning about us would be grand-scale dumpster diving.

Black Marble - City Lights 2012 - a set on Flickr

Gorgeous pictures from the Suomi satellite, just released by NASA

Dronestagram

A new project from James, keeping track of the sites of illegal drone strikes.

greg.org: the making of: The Satelloons Of Project Echo: Must. Find. Satelloons.

Bomp. bomp. bomp. Satelloon of love. Bomp. bomp. bomp. Satelloon of love.

SkyCube: The First Satellite Launched by You! by Tim DeBenedictis — Kickstarter

If this Kickstarter project gets launched, it will literally get launched.

Satellite Eyes

A nifty little Mac app from Tom: it changes your desktop wallpaper to a satellite view of your current location.

Alas, it requires Lion, an operating system I’ve been trying to avoid installing.

Earth Station: The Afterlife of Technology at the End of the World - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

The wonderful story of an odd place:

The Jamesburg Earth Station is a massive satellite receiver in a remote valley in California. It played a central role in satellite communications for three decades, but had been forgotten until the current owner put it up for sale, promoting it as a great place to spend the apocalypse.

BBC News - Hackers plan space satellites to combat censorship

The network will interpret SOPA as damage and route around it …with SCIENCE!

BUY THIS SATELLITE - Connect Everyone.

This is an excellent idea: buy up a communications satellite and use it to provide free internet. I kinda wish it were a Kickstarter project though.

LIVE REAL TIME SATELLITE AND SPACE SHUTTLE TRACKING

A real time satellite tracking web application. Over 8000 satellites are tracked and can be displayed on the familiar Google Maps interface.

Interesting Google Satellite Maps

From Area 51 to the Mall Of America, James Archer documents them all.