urthecast
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Watch the first full-color HD videos of Earth from space
It's no longer a challenge to get astonishingly sharp photos of the Earth from space, but video? That's another matter. UrtheCast is about to open the floodgates, however. It just released the first batch of full-color, high-definition video of Earth recorded from the International Space Station. In many ways, the extremely sharp footage (with detail down to 3.3 feet) of Barcelona, Boston and London is like an internet mapping site come to life -- all those pathways are suddenly full of moving boats and cars. The Iris imaging system that recorded these movies won't be fully operational until the summer, but the preview suggests that its customers will get plenty of insights into traffic and other activity that's harder to track from the ground.
UrtheCast to stream live HD footage of Earth from ISS, like Stickam for space
Space nerds, get your browsers ready -- UrtheCast will soon be streaming HD video of Earth straight from the ISS. The system will actually consists of a pair of cameras, one still and one video, that will be mounted on the Russian arm of the station. The still shots will be very wide, covering about 30 miles with a resolution of 18-feet per pixel. Much more exciting will be the three feet per-pixel stream of 3.25fps video that will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You probably won't be able to see yourself waving as the ISS passes overhead, but you should be able to spot your cardboard box fort house. The feeds won't be your typical boring NASA fare either -- you'll be able to search, rewind, and tag objects or events, and UrtheCast is providing APIs for developers to build upon the service. The project won't be launching until June 28th, so bide your time by checking out the video and PR after the break.
