Show HN: Every satellite that passed over any place this week, and its photos
hey HN, i built this because I'm a satellite nerd who was bored this past weekend. type in any place and it finds every satellite that passed over it in the last 7 days (SGP4 on the CelesTrak catalog, tracking 17k+ objects and runs in your browser in about half a second), then pulls the real Sentinel-2 / Landsat / NASA images from those passes. fun fact: all ~17k objects in orbit are drawn on the GPU, solving Kepler's equation every frame. also cool is that Sentinel-2 timestamps are often 5-10 min off from when the sat actually crosses your spot, so some cool math was involved in making it accurate on the site. it only shows real images taken from those exact satellites, and it never store your location. code: https://github.com/dev-Armaan/satellites would love feedback, contributions, or whatever else you guys can offer!
Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
sixtyj
I have seen a lot of sites with satellites’ overviews… I work in geospatial. This site is really good one as you can see exact image taken by a satellite. Well done.
jttnr
That looks really nice. I especially like the view showing the satellite flying overhead and the line marking the scanned area.
wnissen
This is great for planning backpacking trips. I have been using Copernicus but you have a lot more and it's much easier to access. Very nice!
nico
This is very cool, and a bit creepy too, but mostly cool Really liked the UX, even on a small phone screen it was easy to use. I enjoyed the big typing cursor, it was a unique surprise (almost 100% of text form inputs have either a very small vertical line cursor, or nothing at all - the big cursor feels refreshing)
Zeetah
Love the fly overs, and the interface. Just beautiful.
gizajob
Awesome page. Thanks for building.
JeppyG
Very cool. Was this inspired by the latest season of cyberpunk? In case you and Capri need to escape onto a satellite. XD
bketelsen
Great user interface - animations are such a nice touch.
jfsebastian
Pretty damn cool and super smooth. Thanks op!
hxorr
Can you get high res images, or are they typically not made public? Very cool tool
HoldOnAMinute
I don't say this lightly: This may be the best combination of style and substance I have ever seen.
creeble
Um, wow. Amazing UI. This photo of the SF Bay this morning is a great representation of the fog that settles in over the area: https://www.watched.earth/s/3zg2u78u
award_
This is not only a very cool idea, but also fantastic execution! Great work and very neat!
zahirbmirza
oooh. so fun. I imagine, that there is someone with access to this sort of thing, with live imagery from any satellite they click on, in 8k.
tarpump
Really cool, and beautiful UX. For data sources, it would be cool to add Sentinel-1 since SAR sees through clouds, plus the Umbra and Capella open data archives for some high-res passes.
lol8675309
Super broken at the moment - or I'm impatient
animal_spirits
Welldone! very fun to play with
Eridanus2
The relevant launch video trailer on your X page is really well produced. How did you go about constructing it?
anonymous908213
People who prompt an LLM to generate without proper capitalization in order to deceive more people into thinking the text is genuine deserve a special place in hell. Always with the inauthentic feedback CTA, too. This should be killed off HN for flagrantly violating the rules against LLM-generated text, and yet everyone upvotes it.
dingaling
> type in any place and it finds every satellite that passed over it _Most_ satellites. However, nothing associated with the NRO is in the public TLE catalog.