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ISS viewing tonight

In just a few hours the ISS (International Space Station) will be sweeping overhead where I am, and I have clear skies tonight. For others inclined to do naked-eye viewing of manned orbital craft (or unmanned, or perhaps planets are your chosen targets to watch), there are a few resources you might find useful. First off, there is NASA’s Human Space Flight App, updated with the latest orbital tracking data, not only for the ISS, but also the Shuttle, the Hubble Space Telescope, and a number of others. You can reverse that as well, using their Realtime ISS Photos page to see an image of what is below the ISS right this moment. Note that the ISS location is in realtime, but the pictures are from an archive, possibly even the EarthKam; and the European version is the EuroKam variant. In Europe or the rest of the world you might want to use the ESA ISS Seeker applet. Which interestingly enough is built on the next tool I wanted to mention…

Heavens Above isn’t just for multinationals or government agencies; you can create your own account there, and customize your interface for your own interests. It is an extremely powerful database and toolset, so much so that even NASA links to them, and this site makes the wonders of the skies available for everyone to know and observe. They did a killer job on the setup parameters and the graphic output, making it both very easy to select your location and objects of interest, and even easier to understand the results it gives you.

There are a number of other online satellite/planet tracker software packages I use on a regular basis, the next most frequently visited being Night Skies, the Sky and Telescope interactive extension of their This Weeks Sky At A Glance page.

Torchwood Interview, District 9 viral

SFX has a nice interview with the producer of Torchwood about the new special Children of Earth. Originally the BBC America presentation was announced as happening 5 hours or so after it aired in the UK, but that has changed. It starts tomorrow night, July 6th, in the British Isles, and three Torchwood Radio Plays aired last week on BBC Radio 4 (you still have a few days to listen to them in streaming format, but they are only downloadable in the UK). The Torchwood special is being held until the launch of BBC America HD on July 20th. Also airing in Hi Def that week is the new Doctor Who special Planet of the Dead, the series finale of Primeval, and the series premiere of Being Human.

If you haven’t seen the web sites the viral marketing department has put up for the new movie District 9, the bad guys are located at Multi-National United, while the resistance lives at MNU Spreads Lies. The movie has a scheduled release date of August 14th in the US, and is based on the short film Alive in Joburg.

Moon views, Happy 4th

The first pictures have come in from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, with detailed enough images to see objects 10 feet across on the surface. You can see the pictures at their official web site at Arizona State University. This follows close on the heels of JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Lunar satellite Kaguya sending back excellent images of the Moon from its orbit and hard landing. In honor of the holiday, stop-motion fireworks at their finest…

Movie trailers, Robert Sawyer story

This one looks better every time I see a new trailer. You can see them all at the Planet 51 official website, so you will know if you want to see it come November. And then there is the trailer for Tokyo!, the movie William Gibson tweeted about today (or yesterday, depending on your time zone), also looking very interesting. Robert J Sawyer, who already holds a number of awards, including the Hugo and Nebula, is up for another one. The Aurora Awards has his short story collection Identity Theft and other stories on the short list for Best Long-Form Work In English. Until the voting ends, you can read it online here.

New Sandbox in town, Asteroid Storm

I am both a Geek and a Guy, which gives me two counts of wanting to know about, and play with, new toys. So I hang out at web sites like EnGadget, and skim the short version from DVice, and check the new stuff at Gizmodo. I also stop by the more specialized (and therefor lesser-known) sites like Dev Hardware or Girls N Gadgets or TechOn to name a few, because they cover things the monster sized sites miss. When I get seriously into Geek Mode, I hit the MIT Technology Review or the IEEE Explore sites.

Now there is a new player in town; GDGT is a hardware junkies forum, with a twitter-like community twist. It just launched in the last 11 hours or so, which means I can’t even hint at what it might grow up to be. But I love the premise, the interface is intuitive, the layout is clean, the posts are frequent and informed (quantity AND quality, my favorite combination!), and I am signing up for an account there. I recommend you do the same.

Three of the first sites mentioned here included an announcement about Asteroid Storm in the last few hours; a game played by raising your arms while siting in the theater. The tech works by mounting two cameras on the ceiling on either side of the screen and pointed at the audience. As the screen shows them the pilots-eye view, they can modify the spaceships trajectory by raising their hand. If 25 folks to the left of the screen raise their hands, and 22 on the right, the ship will gently steer left. If the count is still 22 on the right, but only 4 on the left, the ship will jackknife right… (It might be amusing to build a virtual version of that movie theater and use the voting of the House and Senate to steer, to see how many orbital rocks our government has tried to slam us into over the years.). This group game environment (NOT an MMORPG, but it should function a lot like one in some respects) will be introduced in UK theaters on July 10th, meaning next Friday. I can’t wait to see how the first few games go, and whether the audience works together to save the ship, or against each other to take it out. The next logical step would be two ships, with the two sides of the audience competing against each other.

Now play that game with a pair of Open Source Data Gloves, which you can build yourself for $23 in parts if you don’t want to buy the $400 commercial version, and you are ready to take over the theater!

Slow Week in Sci-Fi

It is a slow week in Sci-Fi; there are no new episodes on TV this week, because of the holiday coming up (why waste them when the audience isn’t watching TV?). There could have been a monster movie released, since holiday weekends do good box office, but no. Probably no-one wanted to compete with last weeks Transformers 2 and next weeks Blood, The Last Vampire (see the latest trailer here or watch the one before that, below). I don’t know about the book/graphics novel releases; I basically empty my wallet on the counter every time I hit a Borders/Barnes and Nobel/Waldenbooks, and I find if I do my best to ignore the release announcements I can keep from going in more than twice a month. On DVD this week the Stargate Atlantis final season and only half of season 3 of Eureka was all we got (except for a few anime titles I went looking for, but none of my local outlets stocked them). I love Eureka, but why would I buy half a season? Do they think I want to pay $60 for the privilege of being made to wait for the whole thing, when instant gratification would cost me $35? The flip side of that coin is the fact that only the first half of season 3 has aired so far, with the second half kicking off next Friday, July 10th. So if you want to catch up on the story so far, it may be the way to go for you. Yes, this is a slow week in Sci-Fi, but next week promises to be better.