Satellites around the earth

A few years ago, Frank showed you a great visualization from AGI that shows the real-time positions for over 13,000 satellites around the Earth. That post, along with the page he built to show off the visualization using the Google Earth plug-in, have been some of our most popular pages ever, having been viewed nearly 200,000 times!

satellites.jpg

With that in mind, we thought we’d show you all of the great ways to view this data so that new users that may have missed it the first time around can see it as well. The Google Earth files below will automatically update every 30 seconds with the current positions of every satellite, so you can just sit back and watch.

There are three great ways to view these satellites:

1 – The official KML file

2 – Via the Google Earth Plug-in

3 – Watching the video below

As BoingBoing pointed out last year, these 13,000 satellites “represent an infinitesimal drop in the overall volume of their orbits”, but it’s still an amazing display. Thanks to AGI for providing such a great tool to view these satellites.

Google I/O 2009 – Implement Your Own Visualization Datasource

Google I/O 2009 – Implementing Your Own Visualization Datasource Itai Raz, Nir Bar-Lev, Jesse Lorenz — Contents — 0:05 – Agenda 1:00 – What is Google Visualization API? 9:30 – Remote Data Source 14:32 – The Java Open Source Data Source library 17:04 – Java Data Source Demo 31:48 – SalesForce.com Data Source implementation 43:20 – Q&A — End — This session will focus on building a server-side data source compatible with the Visualization API. It will cover the following topics: Using available Libraries for generic data sources, writing a datasource, and datasources on AppEngine.

http://www.youtube.com/v/guhdYoPY3kM?f=videos&app=youtube_gdata