Show HN: Every satellite that passed over any place this week, and its photos

Posted by a585gupt 6 hours ago

hey HN, i built this because i wanted to know what had actually photographed my street.

type in any place and it finds every satellite that passed over it in the last 7 days (SGP4 on the CelesTrak catalog, runs in your browser in about half a second), then pulls the real Sentinel-2 / Landsat / NASA images from those passes.

some fun bits: - the pass search can't skip a pass. checked it against a brute force on poles, the antimeridian and tiny swaths: 0 missed - all ~17k objects in orbit are drawn on the GPU, solving Kepler's equation every frame - Sentinel-2 timestamps are often 5-10 min off from when the sat actually crosses your spot, which was a fun one to figure out

it only says "watched" if a real image exists, and it doesn't store your location.

code: https://github.com/dev-Armaan/satellites

would love feedback, especially on what data sources to add

Comments

Comment by anonymous908213 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by unrented7977 1 hour ago

The nonsensical "I brute force checked it" paragraph is 100% Claude. Nobody writes like that, and no human ever includes this level of irrelevant reassuring detail.

Comment by moecables 1 hour ago

can't believe this is a prompt someone would pass in, my last check if someone was human was their lack of proper grammar

Comment by 52 minutes ago

Comment by HoldOnAMinute 3 hours ago

I don't say this lightly: This may be the best combination of style and substance I have ever seen.

Comment by Loughla 2 hours ago

Seriously though. I actually enjoyed using this. Good job to OP even if it's AI.

Comment by post-it 2 hours ago

I think this is a great counterexample to AI sites that suck. It's not the Claudisms and the borders-and-pills that make them suck, because this has all that but is fantastic.

Comment by dyauspitr 3 hours ago

This is almost certainly Claude but I agree with both style and substance on this post.

Comment by a585gupt 3 hours ago

thanks! stoked to hear it!

Comment by award_ 3 hours ago

This is not only a very cool idea, but also fantastic execution! Great work and very neat!

Comment by a585gupt 3 hours ago

thanks a lot!

Comment by bradknowles 48 minutes ago

Trying to type in the location field is almost impossible. There is something way off in the way the block cursor reacts to character spacing compared to the text in that field.

Comment by sixtyj 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by a585gupt 6 hours ago

thanks a lot!!

Comment by janoelze 41 minutes ago

and built in three days! https://github.com/dev-Armaan/satellites

Comment by wnissen 4 hours ago

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!

Comment by a585gupt 4 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by dingaling 1 hour ago

> 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.

Comment by lol8675309 1 hour ago

Super broken at the moment - or I'm impatient

Comment by Eridanus2 1 hour ago

The relevant launch video trailer on your X page is really well produced. How did you go about constructing it?

Comment by nico 4 hours ago

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)

Comment by a585gupt 4 hours ago

thanks, glad to hear it!

Comment by tarpump 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by a585gupt 2 hours ago

Thanks for the sources, will look into them!

Comment by animal_spirits 1 hour ago

Welldone! very fun to play with

Comment by JeppyG 4 hours ago

Very cool. Was this inspired by the latest season of cyberpunk? In case you and Capri need to escape onto a satellite. XD

Comment by a585gupt 4 hours ago

haha thanks!

Comment by jttnr 5 hours ago

That looks really nice. I especially like the view showing the satellite flying overhead and the line marking the scanned area.

Comment by mxuribe 3 hours ago

Yeah, that was so cool; like something right out of a call sci-fi movie or show!

Comment by a585gupt 5 hours ago

thanks!!

Comment by hxorr 3 hours ago

Can you get high res images, or are they typically not made public?

Very cool tool

Comment by a585gupt 3 hours ago

for most places in the world ~10m/px is the best public image res, some lower (ex. rural areas) and some higher, am working on sourcing higher res for the areas where it's available tho

Comment by zahirbmirza 3 hours ago

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.

Comment by a585gupt 2 hours ago

yeah def some generals who use stuff that mogs this

Comment by bketelsen 4 hours ago

Great user interface - animations are such a nice touch.

Comment by a585gupt 4 hours ago

thanks!!

Comment by Zeetah 4 hours ago

Love the fly overs, and the interface. Just beautiful.

Comment by a585gupt 4 hours ago

thanks so much!

Comment by jfsebastian 4 hours ago

Pretty damn cool and super smooth. Thanks op!

Comment by a585gupt 4 hours ago

thanks!!

Comment by gizajob 4 hours ago

Awesome page. Thanks for building.

Comment by a585gupt 4 hours ago

thanks a lot!

Comment by creeble 3 hours ago

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: