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UrtheCast Releases Its First Commercial Videos of Earth
schwit1 writes: UrtheCast has released high resolution videos of three Earth cities taken from its camera on ISS. Take a look. The cameras are quite successful in capturing the motion of vehicles on highways and road, which is amazing considering the vibrations that ISS experiences merely from astronaut movements. Quartz reports: "The company plans to offer the imagery in several tiers, from a free video feed on its website to an API that will allow customers, including corporations, governments and individuals, to purchase imagery data from its database or make real-time requests for a look at a given spot on the earth. The cameras scan the ground under the ISS, which tracks the earth between about 51 degrees north and south latitude."
I initially thought this was shopped, but you can see the angle change where there are tall buildings. That's pretty cool video for something taken at 250 miles (400 km) up travelling at 4.75 miles/second (7.6 km/s).
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The traffic has to be simulated somehow, right? I guess sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic, but I can understand how the rooftops move as the ISS changes position but the cars on the road stay very much planted.
UrtheCast has released high resolution videos of three Earth cities taken from its camera on ISS.
Thanks for qualifying that. If you had only said "cities", my first question would have been which planet are they on.
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OK, I was like, "meh". Traffic in Boston. Whatever. Then I noticed the hi-rises on the right... slowly moving (yes, I know the station is actually moving; but everything is relative).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
...at which the blurry dots are moving. At least, if the ISS happens to be overhead at just the right moment for you. And it's daytime. And not cloudy.
There's a whole lot of hype behind urthecast, but I have a feeling this thing is rather less useful than it's been made out to be...
> UrtheCast has released high resolution videos of three Earth cities taken from its camera on ISS.
So taxpayers have been pouring billions into the ISS so some company sticks a camera on it and sells you photos? Screw that. Should be public domain.
Full motion video with that much resolution is going to be EXPENSIVE to store for very long so they are not going to be doing that.
The problem here really is the storage and retrieval of such huge amounts of data, at least that's the problem once you get the data down and processed. I think this kind of stuff is great for getting high resolution still imagery but they are not going to be doing video except on special occasions and for special locations. You are going to have to order it in advance, and then wait until they manage to get it for you, but you won't get historical video for some random location because they won't be able to afford to keep it laying around for you.
Another problem they face is being able to provide timely data. The ISS orbit takes just longer than 90 min and if you are just taking pictures of what's going under the ISS at the time, it's going to be quite some time before you re-image the same patch of real-estate with similar lighting. You might get a few passes in a month, but depending on the weather and cloud situation it may be months before you get a picture of that one interesting spot again. Problem is, you don't really know in advance how long this interval will be, nor do you know who might need the imagery and be willing to pay for it if you keep it around. So what do you do? Buy disk space to keep it around and hope somebody pays you for it some day? I don't think so.
No what you do is take orders for future data and keep snapshots from the past with longer and longer intervals between the snapshots as it gets further back in the past. You throw away data as quickly as you can get it processed, fulfill your standing orders, then start winnowing though what's left for your updated snapshot from "today". But you simply must be down sizing your data storage, throwing away data which is worthless and down sampling stuff that might be interesting... But that's what "big data" is all about right? Running "map reduce" jobs and throwing away the original data because it's too big to keep around.
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I wont be satisfied until i see my own tablet displaying google earth real time in the app doing one of those infinite recursion effects.
Why is anyone impressed by this when the Hubble deep field exposure time was two million seconds, or approximately 23 days @ 16,000 mph.
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I swear I read that as UrethraCast.
I had to re-read that several times before figuring out that it's a weird way to spell something that sounds like "EarthCast". I think we can all agree that this is much, much better than "UrethraCast"
I thought it was a catheter company.
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Didn't I just do that into the crapper?
Why would anyone need videos from space when you can get them from helicopters and drones in better resolution?
we have you on pictures from the space station showing you were going 50 on main st and can see where you slowed to 30 when you spotted my car.
I was very excited reading the post, went there, and probably missed the sufficient nerdyness to actually appreciate what was shown in a low-resolution video clip of less than 1 minute. Okay, yes, it is moving, as high-rise buildings show. The rest is static, way way below Google Earth. What the heck! I said to myself and went to write this post.
"which is amazing considering the vibrations that ISS experiences merely from astronaut movements."
You might be surprised, but many cameras have a system to remove those vibrations and if not, there are filters for that.
Unfortunately also many filmmakers don't seem to know that or they're just to cheap to pay 50$ an hour to rent a steadycam fixture.
https://www.urthecast.com/compiled/js/marketing_site_v2.js?ver=v1.7.5
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...red=function(){var a=U(this,"buffered"),b=a.length-1,c=this.z.sb=this.z.sb||0;re...
Yay, marketing!