Show HN: ISS in Real Time – 25 Years Aboard the International Space Station

callumprentice · 2025-10-28T16:24:59 1761668699

https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/iss_photo_explorer/ind...

My daughter and I made this 10 years ago for the NASA Space Apps Challenge and I notified a whole bunch of folk at NASA but never heard anything back. Laughably amateurish compared to this magnificent work but it was fun to make.

We actually started work on the next version - a tool that lets you mark begin/end photo frames from those incredible fly-bys and save them off as video but it's maybe not worth it now.

bfeist · 2025-10-28T19:15:35 1761678935

Very cool! Your idea about auto-generating timelapse videos was taken up by NASA. https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/BeyondThePhotography/CrewEarthObser...

dylan604 · 2025-10-28T20:55:30 1761684930

I've always found the timelapse videos from ISS much more interesting than from satellites in geosync at least artistically. The angles are more interesting. I love the ones at night where you can see the city lights, the stars in the background, the Kármán line, auroras, and lightning.

One of the first projects I when I was learning how to be a proper hacker by using curl (at least according to certain states) was from NASA images which I would then turn into timelapse videos as well. I used imagery from SOHO to watch the sun on a weekly basis with a cronjob that would run once a week and deliver a video.

callumprentice · 2025-10-28T22:36:41 1761691001

Wow - that's incredible. I can't wait to take a look. Thanks for the pointer.

Kye · 2025-10-28T23:17:20 1761693440

Go around them and radio the astronauts on the ISS about it.

FredPret · 2025-10-28T14:07:19 1761660439

This is unbelievably amazing. Instant favourite, along with the Apollo 11 replay site https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/

jamesmontalvo3 · 2025-10-28T21:08:37 1761685717

Is stated in the linked article but in case anyone missed it: same creators as Apollo in Real Time

jamesmontalvo3 · 2025-10-27T15:32:52 1761579172

Awesome work! Surely a huge labor of love to dig up that much content out of the public domain. Congrats on the launch!

tagami · 2025-10-28T17:10:10 1761671410

Extraordinary work. We’re able to go back to the dates and times when our labs were operational. This context is profound for our engagement with schools around the world. Well done!

phendrenad2 · 2025-10-28T23:23:20 1761693800

I'd love to have a real 24-hour feed of the Earth from the ISS on my wall. But in reality, the ISS loses ground connection constantly.

jamesmontalvo3 · 2025-10-29T01:24:51 1761701091

Not really constantly. For 20 seconds every 30 minutes or so when it changes what satellite it’s pointed at, plus longer outages throughout the day depending on satellite usage by other systems. This may be just a minute or so every hour on a high-coverage day, or it may include 15-minute outages occasionally at low-coverage times (typically when the crew are asleep)

extraduder_ire · 2025-10-28T17:12:16 1761671536

Is there a historical record of the data that appears through the ISS stats tracker?

https://iss-mimic.github.io/Mimic/

Lots of interesting information in there, like how much water is getting used, and which direction all the panels are facing.

9dev · 2025-10-28T20:20:01 1761682801

I turned the awesome work of the ISS Mimic into a Prometheus+Grafana stack a while ago: https://github.com/radiergummi/iss-metrics

Never got around to create bespoke visualisations for all the different kinds of metrics, but having all that data in Grafana made it a lot easier to play around and get insights.

bfeist · 2025-10-29T01:11:57 1761700317

Awesome. You don’t happen to have 25 years of recorded telemetry, do you?

bfeist · 2025-10-28T19:16:55 1761679015

Yes and no. I have 7+ years and counting of telemetry recordings but I don't know of a resource that would let me get all of it historically. If you know of one, please let me know. The recordings that I do have will be integrated into the website at some point. I was going to do it as part of the initial launch but I ran out of time.

mwigdahl · 2025-10-28T20:56:56 1761685016

Incredible, such a clear labor of love! Thank you for sharing it with the world!

ericcumbee · 2025-10-29T01:22:41 1761700961

hard to believe its been 25 years. I remember watching CSPAN at my grandmothers on a friday night watching the live coverage of STS-88 Mating the Russian Zarya Module to the US Unity node.

etiennebausson · 2025-10-28T14:10:45 1761660645

Nice work, love the access to all the comms history.

Areading314 · 2025-10-28T15:24:11 1761665051

Is there a list of useful science/inventions that this project has led to?

lloydatkinson · 2025-10-28T17:03:37 1761671017

Such a shame they want to burn this up

ta1243 · 2025-10-28T15:23:08 1761664988

25 years and -5 days?

exitb · 2025-10-28T15:47:28 1761666448

In five days we will mark 25 years since Expedition 1 begun.

2025-10-27T14:27:33 1761575253

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