"Over Twitter" To Find Out What's Orbiting Over Your Head

By Nancy Atkinson - February 3, 2009 at 6:25 PM UTC | Space Exploration
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[/caption] If you enjoy satellite spotting and are a fan of the social networking mini-feed

Twitter

here's something just for you. Robert Simpson at

Orbiting Frog

has created a Twitter feed that reports upcoming visible transits of interesting objects orbiting over several cities in the world, such as

Amsterdam

,

Belfast

,

Chicago

,

Hong Kong

,

Honolulu

,

Moscow

,

New York

,

Paris

,

Rome

,

San Francisco,

Sydney

, and

Vancouver

. And he is willing to take requests for creating feeds for cities all over the planet. Rob creates the feeds with data from the

Heaven's Above

website to determine when the International Space Station (ISS) and Hubble will be visible in the relevant location. When an overhead pass approaches a certain location, an alert appears on the Twitter feed. You will get 30-45 minutes warning on the sighting opportunity. So, if you're a

Twitter-aholic like me

, check out

Orbiting Frog's website.

What's really great is that the Tweet alerts only appear when the weather in your location is good enough to allow the transit to be seen. The weather data comes from Yahoo! Weather. Each Tweet provides information on the magnitude and elevation of the orbiting object so you'll know where to look (and how hard you have to squint to see it!)

Rob says if you live within 20 miles of one of these cities, the data in the feed will still be correct for your location. Within 50 miles of one of these cities then the data will still be only a minute out in most cases.

To make a request for adding a particular city, check out

Orbiting Frog.

Rob also has info on how to subscribe to an RSS feed for the same info if you're not into Twitter. But, personally, I think Twitter is going to take over the universe, and resistance is futile, so you might as well join in.

Once again, here's the

Orbiting Frog website page on Over Twitter

. Enjoy!

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com