The FlightAware API I was using (they have multiple) didn't provide all the data I wanted either. The ADSB Exchange Rapid API was more comprehensive, but came at a cost.

The aircraft don't broadcast everything over ADSB - so these sites are all pulling from a database somewhere else. It appears ADSB Exchange and some of the pi based UIs use the tar1090-db. This was easy to work with and free - just need to update it periodically due to registration changes.

https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090-db

A number of planes fly low and when I check flightaware, they're not on it. Or there's a plane that could be it, but it's flight path is heading East to West 30 miles North of me, while this plane came from the South heading North. Also, pretty much once a month or so, a pair of A10 Warthogs fly over or near our house. Last month, we had a real treat with 4 of them directly over the house, better than an air show.

So I'd like to setup 4 cameras on my tower focused skyward and have them try to catch clips of planes. I'll be looking at your work to see if I can also match those with flightaware.

People often think an aircraft is flying with transponder off because it doesn't appear on FR24/FlightAware. In fact these companies allow blocking aircraft from their service; this is why ADS-B Exchange is better.

Surveillance aircraft, if operated by a government entity, would not be required to transmit anyway. (Though they may choose to for safety purposes if it doesn't compromise the mission, just as the military often do in busy airspace.)

Recently there was a post of Google satellite cameras capturing a B-2 Stealth Bomber showing up on Google Maps [1]. Would such planes be captured by a vision system only, and would that be of concern to the government that might be trying to keep it undetected?

1: https://www.google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B001%2718.5%22N+93%C...

Here is the HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627105

Here's a Techradar post on this: https://www.techradar.com/news/eagle-eyed-redditor-spots-a-f...

I'm sure some people don't like the noise, but I love seeing the planes so close.

Back in my day, everyone’s address was listed in the phone book. If you wanted to remain anonymous, you had to pay a service charge to keep yourself from being listed!

And now those articles are searchable on newspapers.com!

I do have to admit it was fun finding my mom's old Red Cross activities and my dad's chess tournaments. Any chess players remember Sammy Reshevsky? He was a friend of my dad's and would sometimes stay with us when he visited Eugene for a chess tournament.

(and you can of course unlist yourself)

I'm somewhat interested, did it go down differently in e.g. U.S., i.e. are directory services gone, too?

Of course, your tax forms are documents touched by the government, in which your declared income is stated.

The thing about unbiased random noise is that it cancels itself out! And for the most part, we can compute exactly how many data points are needed to achieve a particular level of precision in the result.

Because it's a telescope, it's designed to be aligned at night. It's more of a pain to do during the day (such as for an eclipse or I guess tracking planes). But there's no reason you couldn't align it to stars at night and it will its alignment pretty precisely. I'm not sure how much drift there is in that over say 24+ hours though. It's also smart enough with the Celestron controller to never point at the sun even during a slew. I'm not sure if it has that same safety feature when controlled from a computer, which would be a major concern with daytime use.

But a 6" f/10 (so ~1500mm lens) telescope with a full frame camera is still a 1° field of view so the same as you have now. Smaller sensor would be tighter field of view.

And of course the obvious drawback: None of this setup would be weatherproof

Alignment has been a big pain for me. I might actually have to look at how to use stars to correctly position everything.

https://www.adsbexchange.com/

Can you please share more details on that docker image setup?

I was always worried about making it a public data source. Kinda seems like it could be potentially dangerous, but that’s completely paranoid speculation. Thanks for sharing!

I got all the camera gear on ebay, which was lucky.

I figure since it is all based on ADS-B data, there isn't anything too crazy about making it public. I am also still trying to figure out if it is actually useful for anything... besides getting unlimited plane photos!

The only non-public information you're making available is the approximate location of your house!

It's a very high end approach to planespotting though. People used to just tick off serial numbers in books :D

This is seriously one of the most fun and inventive projects I've seen. Such ingenuity at every stage of this pipeline. I didn't even realize they made cameras like this.

Bravo! Please keep it up!

so find intersection of all these planes' paths, then using geometry figure out possible locations, then find their intersections..

If they are flying without ADS-B (which is legal for the military when needed) they won't be picked up by this system so no filtering needed.

https://www.aviationtoday.com/2019/07/23/new-rule-allows-mil...

Not just because of the potential safety issue, but because of how easy it is to track you.

In many areas, they have Wide Area Multilateration equipment installed that will show the real location of the transmitter, instead of the fake GPS coordinates you transmit. Normally it's there to double-check the ADS-B coordinates are correct, to track older planes without ADS-B, and to give true altitude readings, but it will track illegal transmitters as a side effect.

Even in areas where they haven't installed a permanent MLAT system, they usually have some sort of equipment that can track down a 1090MHz transponder. For-example, search and rescue planes often carry one.