What surprised me is how satellites far away (in the night zone, it's daylight for hours yet) could still 'see' me, or rather, I could see them not even that close to the horizon. I would love to see how far away one of the objects is when clicking or hovering over it.
Console shows
THREE.WebGLRenderer: Context Lost. index-DMul8aia.js:3819:24355 Object { error: undefined } Stowaway failed to start
It also made firefox actually hard crash to desktop!
When I was a kid — back when travelling still felt new and exciting — I would see a plane crossing the early evening sky and try to put myself in it. Not to go anywhere in particular. I just wanted to know what the world looked like from up there, right then, to whoever was sitting by that window.
The feeling was strongest at sunset. I'd be watching a good one from the ground and think about how much better it had to be from up there, above the haze, with the light coming in level. The same sunset from a perspective I couldn't reach.
Travel has lost most of that. Airports, queues, delays: everything wrapped around flying has got steadily worse. But the flying itself hasn't changed. An hour into a clear evening flight, forehead against the glass, looking down at a world you almost never see from that angle, and it is still one of the quietly moving experiences I know.
Stowaway is that part, without the rest of it.
We live pretty close to a flight path and still point at planes as they go past and wonder where they might be going on holiday.
Sadly no longer live close enough that I can see my house when approaching the local airport. That was always cool.
I'm surprised by how few people seem to do this. I feel like I'm the only adult acting like a child when I do it. Look around and see most everyone else treating it like a night time bus ride through a tunnel.
P.S. Great project name. Stowaway. Perfect.
I checked from Brighton, UK, and there is perhaps the same crickets (and birdsong for this time).
I found it quite compelling.
Be cool if you scaled the volume to latitude and chirp-rate to temperature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolbear%27s_law)
All this attention has maxed out my Google 3D Tiles quota, so the ground textures in ride-along mode are being throttled. Everything else works — sky, aircraft and satellite tracking, sound — it's just the terrain that may come in flat or missing. I'm working on a caching layer and a proper fallback rather than just buying my way out of it, and I'd take suggestions if anyone's solved this before.
Thanks for checking it out!
https://github.com/adamcharnock/python-srtm
I originally used it for doing line-of-sight calculations for a wireless ISP I started.
I can empathize with your quota....was gifted a FlightWall recently (https://theflightwall.com) and it constantly throws a 'too many flights' indicator given that I live in a major metro with quite a bit of air traffic. I'm sure it was thrilling and terrifying to see your usage spike. Wishing you all the best of luck!
I have to say though, it's very weird you're hitting API rate limits. airplanes.live is a free no-authentication needed API that lets you poll it 1 time per second, and with each poll it returns flight information for ALL flights in up to (I think) a 250nm radius.
I doubt this commercial product could use that API but my point is that this data isn't that valuable. Additionally for the size of the thing the could just put and adsb receiver in it....