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International Space Station (ISS) HD Earth Viewing Experiment

JacksinPA

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Since acquiring a 10.1" Samsung Galaxy Tab A tablet recently, I've greatly enjoyed watching the video feed being downloaded from the ISS. They have several HD cameras aboard, one pointing fore, one aft & one straight down. Except for frequent 'Please stand by' screens that popup when they are either switching cameras or have other problems, the view from 400 km is awesome. They are too high to be able to make out even major surface features like cities, roads, etc., but the scenery is tremendous. To access the video feed on your computer see
ISS HD Earth Viewing Experiment. An ISS HD app is available in the Google Play store.

The basic view is a split screen, showing the ISS' position relative to Earth. Countries are labeled & you can expand the view in the usual way to pick out even obscure & remote countries & islands, which is a good way to bone up on that geography class you slept through in HS. A box in the lower right gives altitude in kms, speed, latitude & longitude.

A button at the lower right switches to full screen camera view. The aft camera has the right side of the view blocked by a big piece of equipment but you can eliminate that by simply expanding the screen view.

Another feature is the camera icon at the lower left that lets you take snaps of whatever the feed is viewing. I have snaps of the Atlas Mtns in N Africa, the Himalayas in Nepal, several snaps of the Sinai Peninsula taken on different orbits & lots of snaps of the Australian coast line. As I view the ISS feed mainly late at night, only the Eastern Hemisphere is viewable, so passing over Australia is almost a nightly event. New Zealand is usually covered by clouds. It is summer in the southern hemisphere so there is more cloud cover than in winter.

One criticism I have is that the little box with the lat/long info is not shown in the full screen mode, so you don't have the actual position data record when you take a snap.

I haven't explored all the functions but an icon on the upper left lets you switch to NASA TV with various programming.
 
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