ISS Photo Explorer 2

(3,469,299 photos / Missions 1 - 63 (in progress) / June 2020)

Description

My 8 year old daughter is fascinated by space and the International Space Station in particular so we made this simple experiment together. It tries to provide a way of exploring the millions of photographs which have been taken from the International Space Station since the first mission in late 2000. The latitude/longitude location of each photo taken is plotted and shown in the tracks overlay. It was a huge amount of fun to work on and she wants to be an astronaut when she's older. Or a food scientist. Or a singer / actress. Or a vet... :)

Click anywhere on the globe and you will see a list of thumbnail images that were taken within 1 degree of latitude/longitude in the box on the right hand side. Clicking a thumbnail lets you see a larger version of the image on the right hand side. Then, you can either:

• Click on that image to open a new window in your browser and see the full size version - it's often very large.
• Alternatively, you can click on the left and right arrows in the right hand box and move between photographs in the same set (not necessarily the same as the thumbnails). This is especially useful for moving through sequences of images.

The other controls at the top open this Help box, jump to a random location and allow you to expand the globe view to fill the browser window.

Caveat

• All the images are loaded directly from the NASA Gateway to Astronaut Photography and can be a little slow sometimes. NASA have been gracious enough to provide us with this amazing resource so please consider trying later on if that is the case.

Future work

• Expand the searching so you can find photographs by mission, camera type etc.
• The sequences look incredible and it should be possible to write something to save off a sequence locally and the use ffmpeg to turn the set of images into a movie
• Search by feature - E.G. "Show me pictures of Crew Dragon approaching"
• Sometimes the images take forever to load and it feels like the app is broken - need to have some indication that they are loaidng

Credits

• All the photos were generously provided by Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center - there is a treasure trove of information to be found at their Gateway to Astronaut Photography
• The SVG image of the ISS was taken from Wikipedia
• three.js WebGL library
• Sole tween library
• pako zlib library

Comments, feedback and of course fixes for out doubtless many mistakes are very welcome - contact details are here

You can close this Help box by clicking anywhere...