Beaming the International Space Station

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JJB17463rdBombGroup
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Beaming the International Space Station

Post by JJB17463rdBombGroup »

Note this is not a crime unlike shining a LASER on to an aircraft to blind a pilot.
The reason why is that the light is so much fainter at the distant station,essentially harmless and it's not in the same circumstance as a piloted craft.
However use much caution and be sure the object beamed IS the International Space Station otherwise if you make a mistake and it is an aircraft you will
likely face serious Federal prosecution.

A good way to do this would be to join your local astronomical society and coordinate the fun project with an astronaut onboard the ISS

Some videos on this.

ISS Flash Project
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UoY15WDuHQ&t=92s

Can You See A Laser Pointer From The Space Station?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCQ2CbfGs6g

An improvement to using a 1 watt or more blue or green LASER Pointer would be to couple the output of the LASER with a collimator (Telescope,monocular, rifle scope etc) with a 10 times or more magnification say perhaps set the uppermost limit at maybe 24 times as it will be more difficult to aim at the station if the magnification is much higher (though it would be much brighter if seen).
The purpose of this is to have the beam have much less divergence and have a much higher photon density in a smaller amount of space so that it will be much more noticeable onboard the International Space Station.
Again the higher the magnification and more parallel the beam the brighter it will be but the more difficult it will be to aim accurately.


Ideally this should be mounted co axially on a spotting telescope on a stable tripod so that tracking of the ISS is more easily done.
A motorized tracking system could help but adds complication and expense
Without using a tripod and spotting scope don't bother using a collimator as aiming will become too difficult.
But a bare high power pointer without collimation or a tripod can work.


Here is a website that shows you the times when the International Space Station is overhead.
https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/
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Solareagle
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Re: Beaming the International Space SSation

Post by Solareagle »

I was pretty sure I randomly saw it one night when I stepped out after sunset, so I pulled up isstracker.com and sure enough it went right over me. Since then I occasionally see it about 10:15-10:30 central time. its fun to randomly spot it, especially with friends, then pull up isstracker to confirm. Its crazy I can still see it from SD when its over the east coast.

http://www.isstracker.com/
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Solareagle
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Re: Beaming the International Space Station

Post by Solareagle »

Interesting they say its the third brightest object in the sky. One thing that can be the brightest object in the sky is stratospheric balloons. I work at a place that makes balloons for NASA, DoD and Google, so there's a lot of test flights around here of 50-80ft diameter balloons, which even at altitude are brighter than any star. If you put magnification on them you see a big pumpkin! lol

They steer the balloon around by increasing or decreasing altitude to put the balloon into known wind patterns. The helium balloons have an air bladder inside with a fan to pump air in and out if the bladder, which adds or subtracts weight, and that's how they control the altitude. Satellites only pass over periodically, but you can park a balloon. ;)
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Jacques
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Re: Beaming the International Space Station

Post by Jacques »

I’ve watched some of your handiwork on FlighRadar24! I understood that they (HBAL) were trimmed for a certain altitude range, but had no clue that their altitude could be changed as you described. I assume there are even limitations to that since I’ve seen more than a few ending up well off the US West Coast. Such a cool project, though.


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JJB17463rdBombGroup
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Re: Beaming the International Space Station

Post by JJB17463rdBombGroup »

Another site that is helpful is NASA Live: Earth Views from the Space Station on YouTube (and other websites as well with NASA's High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment. Sometimes the views will be all black (at night with no cities to view).
Other times there are communications problems unfortunately.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mSgb-gWjy0

It's useful but only at certain times can the ISS's HDEV camera face your point on Earth but it's possible using a ISS tracker at some times to perform a LASER Flash experiment on the HDEV camera over Internet viewing and when possible to record the event with video capture on your computer or some other recording method.

A good Android app is ISS HD Live .

That's interesting about the weather balloons.
Yeah do you remember the Japanese Balloon bombs of WWII that was an interesting application.
Last edited by JJB17463rdBombGroup on 30 Jul 2018, 01:27, edited 2 times in total.
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Killratio
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Re: Beaming the International Space Station

Post by Killratio »

Wow, interesting stuff. Not sure how close it passes to where I am...
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Jacques
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Beaming the International Space Station

Post by Jacques »

Darryl,

Anywhere between 330 and 410-430 km plus or minus several km. (Wikipedia) I don’t think orbital decay and boost periods to bring ISS back up into higher orbit occur with any regularity with relation to a specific location on Earth. But, 330 km or 430 km, still just seems really small to me! I agree, really cool video, and not something I had thought about until now.


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