If you didn’t know, I’ve had a long running fascination with space. So when YouTuber khyar mashed together more than a thousand photos the ISS took whilst flying over Earth into a spectacular film reel, I was certainly excited.

The end result is quite something special and a must see for any space nerd like myself. Here’s a quote from khyar himself.

I thought I’d have a go at making a movie from the ISS photographs on NASA’s database. The hard part was actually harvesting 1190 frames from the database which is set up for a one-by-one procedure. I certainly wasn’t going to click and save 1190 2Mb files manually so after reverse engineering their system I wrote a nice little script to generate the html hi-res request urls, and then another script to harvest the files through ftp on the NASA computer. You are greeted by a nice message saying “This US Government computer is for authorized users only. By accessing this system you are consenting to complete monitoring with no expectation of privacy. Unauthorized access or use may subject you to disciplinary action and criminal prosecution.” Hehe, reminded me of something I did back in school…. anyway…. the 1190 images were then stitched together using Quicktime Pro. It took 4hrs to download them all (4k res!) and Quicktime could not H264 compress them in 4k format so we have to settle for 1080p -_- (maybe I will upload the raw 2.25Gb .mov file in the future). The framerate is 25fps, definitely too fast for realtime but smooth to watch.

Psychedelic light shows courtesy of charged particles from the Sun interacting with our Magnetic field Look at all the stars too!!!!! Just imagine being up there and seeing this with your own eyes! The brilliant green of the Aurora, the red above it, the blue of the oceans, the millions of twinkling stars, the city lights and the thunderstorms and clouds. So much in this movie!!!!

The images span the following times (according to the camera metadata):
17/09/2011 11:19:56 – 18/09/2011 15:25:35 (GMT)