Lamp that Glows Whenever Space Station is Overhead

Lamp that Glows Whenever Space Station is Overhead

The idea of this project is to come up with a really neat desk lamp that provides a visualization of when the International Space Station is overhead. This lamp was built to illuminate as it serves as a signal whenever it s overhead as long as the station is more than 10 degrees above the horizon.

The lamp uses a teensy board to light a few LEDs on the edge of a piece of plexiglass as the orbit of the ISS decays over time. A stand-alone satellite tracking lamp will eventually lose its accuracy, parse tracking data in the internet is needed. The creator wrote a Python script to parse the data that does all of the calculations for the station’s orbit, which can occasionally change unpredictably. Everything on the computer runs in the Gnome panel and is passed to the Teensy over the USB connection.

It is a really great build that provides a reminder that there are people in space, and we think this would be a great way to provide some notification of upcoming Iridium flares, or when it is most likely to pick up some APRS packets.