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Comment by 52-6F-62 | Hacker News Reader

Hey that's pretty fun.

Thanks for posting this. I wonder if I could see it from the city. It's supposed to be visible in 41 days for about 4 minutes. It would be nice if they could have a little bit more accurate timing, though.

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After you enter your location, click the hamburger menu button in the top right corner of the map. It gives the ETA time to the second, the duration, and the angle from north.

Now if only there was an app that let you set a weather dependent alarm so I don't wake up at 3 am to a cloudy sky.

Hmm, for Portland OR it tells me cheerfully "You will not be able to see the satellite within the next 2087 hours. Please check again later." I guess that's only one third of the time until it de-orbits, so I may still get a chance.

I also got that result for every city I tried in BC and Alberta, even though the path looks like it goes right through there soon. Not sure if I misunderstand the map though.

Same for Ottawa.

Time of day matters in addition to location, as you'll only be able to see it just after dusk or just before dawn when the sky is dark but the sun is still reflecting off the satellite

Same for New York. That seems ... incorrect to me, given that it's in a polar orbit and completes an orbit every 90 minutes. It ought to be passing over me fairly often, no?

You can't see it during the day and you can't see it when it's in Earth's shadow.

ISS Detector has this! Well, you can get push notifications when sightings are about to occur, and it takes weather info into account.

I'm not sure if it tracks the Humanity Star yet, but they've mentioned it on their twitter so I can see it being available soon:

http://www.issdetector.com/

Thank you for sharing this, very cool!

I missed that. Thanks!

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