It’s pretty hard trying to keep tabs on an object that’s traveling at around 17,000 mph, 260 miles above the earth, but this cool Astro Viewer site lets you track the International Space Station perfectly at any time. In fact you can literally watch the ISS position change real time in front of your very eyes. Uber cool.
While it’s hard to grasp that kind of speed, the live Google Earth tracker really brings it home – we’re talking about crossing whole oceans in just a few minutes, and continents too. Spooky.
Super nerds can also get a depiction of when the space station will actually be visible above their heads in their own country, down to the time of day and amount of visibility. Just enter in your city in the search box, and you’re good to go. Great for sky watchers.
Yay for space science! And RIP Mr Spock.
Very nice for a certain type of geek.
My type :-).
If the search box tells you “No location found for the search term:”, you can look up some other location that it does know and then replace the GPS coordinates and name with your own.
example:
http://iss.astroviewer.net/observation.php?lon=-73.986&lat=40.748&name=New%20York%20City
becomes
http://iss.astroviewer.net/observation.php?lon=-2.2730&lat=53.0030&name=KeeleUniversity
Make the latitude negative for southern hemisphere, longitude negative for western hemisphere.
…and if you’d like to look down from the ISS, use this link: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iss-hdev-payload
…or this one to see the view plus an overlay of the countries beneath: http://www.satflare.com/isshd/