This satellite pass had a slightly better elevation than the earlier one.
Our sunflower seedlings that we planted in mid March are now around 20cm high, and growing fast.
The marine layer is starting to fade.
Hackney Downs is scattered with blankets and some people are even in bathing suits, as the sun climbs toward noon.
The pass was captured from Tongva Park (in honor of the indigenous peoples of coastal southern California).
Later in the day at a playground with friends who have a three year old child, we make another 'sunflower' by spinning a yellow plastic bucket chair that has been filled with sand.
During most of the satellite capture a woman was loudly ranting at a police officer.
The call it May Gray (and then later June Gloom).
Sometimes I feel like ranting too.
It is a typical marine layer that hugs the coastline in late spring/early summer in southern California.
Under the topic of "government efficiency" defunding the EPA's Energy Star program is the latest casualty.
The clouds usually "burn off" by noon and return in the evening.
The program costs the government $32 million, while saving American consumers $40 billion annually.
I found a nice spot on a bridge near the Santa Monica pier.
Maybe I missed something on efficiency, but that sounds like for every dollar the government spends on the program, consumers benefit $350.
The 10 fwy passes under and the historic Sears building stands nearby.
California's goal of selling only new electric vehicles by 2035 is also up in the air.
The high school I teach at partially burned in the Palisades Fire.
And the defunding of NOAA may also result in NOAA 18 being turned off.
The Sears building has become our temporary school site.
From space, everything seems so peaceful.
The sidewalk on the bridge is narrow.
I guess appearances may deceive.
A number of students and teachers squeezed by as I was doing the recording.
Last week was the hottest May day on record in the UK, today is decidedly cooler and greyer.
Only one teacher paused to ask me what I was doing.
A reminder that Spring is always an unstable threshold, like any season.
Last night, at an event called We Are Not Numbers at the Southbank Centre, Palestinian writer Ahmed Alnaouq and artist Malak Mattar shared stories from their personal lives and those of their family members in Gaza.
This image was gathered as part of a class workshop I ran today, as a simple way of bearing out the radio networks that underpin much of our contemporary environment.
Malak described an event of being denied border crossing into Israel for the purpose of showing her paintings in an exhibition in Jerusalem when she was just a teenager, and realising for the first time that she was 'in a cage'.
This image was gathered as part of a class workshop I ran today, as a simple way of bearing out the radio networks that underpin much of our contemporary environment.
Ahmed spoke about how writing and storytelling helped him emerge from a depression after his 23-year old brother was killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2014.
We made the mistake of starting and stopping the recording sporadically.
Both spoke about the sometimes visible, sometimes invisible barriers to speaking about Palestine in the UK.
So this image represents the individual recordings spliced together using Audition.
In Palestine, Malak said, "I would never be barred from speaking at my own exhibition".
it was very hot and muggy but also dry?
Yet she spoke about countless experiences of being silenced in the UK, whether in arts institutions or in public forums.
much excitement as we heard the sounds of the satellite broadcast.
Ahmed added that UK institutions are so concerned about being 'neutral' that they implicitly support Israel's genocide.
simultaneous conversations in Spanish Italian and English.
For me, hearing these claims, especially from Palestinian artists whose family members have been killed in the current genocide and in previous Israeli assaults on life in Gaza, made the conditions of speaking, voicing and expressions of mere humanity in the UK more palpable than ever before.
Curious fellow students and researchers stopped by to experience what we were capturing.
first time recording weather images
sunny day in london
amazing teachers, sensitive knowledge, embodied physics
we can see all of England some of Wales but Scotland and Northern Ireland were covered by a cloud_static_nebulous_void
we can see where all 3 of us were born!
Recording taken by Ravza, Lene, and Prajvi.
Sunny and clear, occasional fine clouds.
Lene holding the antenna.
it's the hottest labour day that we have on record
it was our first time capturing satellite images
in our image we can see sunny London and cloudy Madrid
Recording taken by Ravza, Lene, and Prajvi.
tally: "it is a very hot day in london.
Lene holding the antenna.
my min is blow by this "citizen science"."
ayesha: "it is hot, we see italy, climate crisis is in the blood"
Ayşe:"the screen is blinded by the sun, I sweat the sun, the grass is greener under the sun, and the climate crisis is disproportional to justice"
Recording taken by Ravza, Lene, and Prajvi.
The hottest May 1st the UK has ever had at 28 degrees celsius
Lene holding the antenna.
It was a very sunny day in London, it was 28º
The weather was summy, clear, 27 degrees celcius.
On January 7th I captured a satellite pass in the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains.
Capturing the waves started with white noise then eevntually after 5 minutes it became clear and sharp.
The winds were wild and within an hour of the pass the Palisades Fire had started.
Image captured from 11:18 - 11:26.
Today I returned to the same location almost 4 months later.
It was a collective exercise with open weather community at Goldsmiths Univerity in the green.
A typical April morning at the Santa Monica pier.
It was cool as a light storm had passed the day before.
A gentle breeze with a high of 16°C.
In the distance there was the constant beeping of trucks backing up and the rattle of jackhammers.
A group of about 20 people gathered near me as I captured the satellite pass.
While the Palisades suburbs were a long way from recovery, the natural landscape seemed rejuvenated.
They all wore a paper number pinned to their shirt.
This is a fire-climax biome.
My guess is that there was some kind charity run/jog with the pier as the end point.
The tops of the shrubs (chamise, laurel sumac, coyote bush, and elderberry) were blackened, but from the base sprouted eager green shoots from the living roots.
The morning is balmy and bright, but my university office feels far too cold.
Many young wildflowers were present (mariposa lily, blue dicks, california brittlebush, bird's-foot trefoil and invasive black mustard).
I layer with a grey wool jumper that I keep in my office for such days.
In my view, however, the clear winner is the wild cucumber.
Whereas my east-facing windows receive piercing sun during the winter, the dense foliage of the oak trees in the small grassy field outside the department keep most light out of my office in spring and summer.
Early after the first rains, the cucumber took advantage of the lack of competition.
It feels like I am the only member of staff in today, everyone is sheltering from the start of Term 3 at home.
Blackened hillsides turned green (and white flowers) as the vines stretched out in all directions.
I buy myself a hot chocolate with whipped cream in the afternoon as consolation!
Many cucumber fruits are already the size of baseballs.
This morning, T plays a video of a Spanish senator who is a trans woman, standing up and admonishing the senate for their attack on trans lives.
Calm, cool conditions were conducive to a clear and crisp recording, marred only by my perennial foe during recent efforts - software glitches, cutting out the audio!
She says ‘you insert yourself in every part of our lives!’ Then she lists all the invasive questions and topics asked by transphobes including ‘Do trans people orgasm?’ ‘Enough!!’ She bellows to the whole senate who applaud.
I had a chance to reflect at a conference yesterday on the nature of these sensory undertakings, the registers and durations that they speak to.
Meanwhile in the U.K., Kier Starmer is ‘pleased’ that ‘we finally have clarity’ on the definition of a woman.
Glitches themselves manifest across multiple durations, and begin to inscribe their marks long before they become apparent on recorded media.
full bright sun and a slight wind.
The deep, granular hardware incompatibilities that will forever prevent this computer from generating a clear image were established several years ago, when it was first built, and will now be registered in this archive for as long as it is sustained.
I went up to the terrace of my building to the 25th floor.
There's something pleasing about this - a sense of material traces across time that the usual quest for the perfect image (the perfect sensory recording) would otherwise strive to eliminate.
I was impatient as my sweat trickled down my forehead.
There are long histories of Western onto-epistemic-political imperatives at work here, and these are now manifest in the technologies and techniques that delivered the signal processing behind our digital world - along with its surrounding marking rhetoric of perfect reproduction, and seamless, immaterial operation.
trying to remember that there is still water in this atmosphere, no matter how dry today feels.
All this observed - I am presently dredging up an unusably 'glitched' computer that, nevertheless, once gave vastly better recordings than the more modern machine used here.
India just suspended the Indus Valley Treaty that comprises of sharing river, Indus, and five bank tributaries, Ravi, Beas, Sutlej, Jhelum, and Chenab with Pakistan after a brutal terrorist attack in Kashmir.
I hope it might deliver a clearer image for the next pass, in 30 minutes time!
The land bleeds, the water is forced to stop.
London has exploded in green during the week T and I were on holiday in Cornwall.
Is justice revenge or is justice freedom of the land, freedom of the water, freedom of the indigenous communities.
The chestnut trees in Hackney Downs are in full foliage and already budding flowers, while the plane trees are a cheerful yellow green.
Thinking of this strange weather swept across India, dark storms leaking into language.
While in Cornwall we spent much of our time visiting several obscure stone circles and ‘quoits’ in the treeless moors, though we did visit one very prominent stone monument that happened to be on our way back to London (Stonehenge!).
It has been over 3 months since the start of the Palisades Fire.
In contrast to the exposed rocks and windswept hills of western Cornwall, the green of London’s treetop overstory is almost overwhelming…
In a unanimous decision a few days ago, the UK Supreme Court ruled that, under the Equality Act of 2010, “sex is binary” and it is based on biology.
I did a satellite capture less than an hour before the beginning of the fire on January 7th.
A trans woman therefore does not come within the definition of a ‘woman’ under the Act, and therefore loses protections made for the benefit of women.
I thought I would return to that location to do another capture.
The court insists that trans rights are still protected under the ruling but it is very unclear how denying someone’s womanhood can be called protection.
Road closures forced me to change plans.
Shon Faye writes that the relative support (though ‘support’ is a strong word here) afforded trans people over the last two decades in the U.K.
As the satellite was about to rise above the horizon, I found myself in the middle of the residential burn zone of the Palisades.
With few trees standing, and even fewer homes, the skyline was favorable for a clear view of the sky.
Judith Butler points out, in an interview with Owen Jones, that anti-trans feminism is more virulent in the U.K.
I found a convenient wall from a burned property to place my laptop.
Several cars slowed during the pass giving me suspicious looks.
T and I mull over the decision and its daily analysis, a decision that has wide ranging implications for many people in our immediate community, not to mention the health and wellbeing of queer and nonbinary folks more broadly.
Who is this man with an antenna in the middle of all the destruction?
How are the rights of non-binary people to be seen under this ruling?
One car lingered for several minutes - I feel I was being filmed.
Or any other place on the spectrum of transness?
Meanwhile, we live in the chaos of tarrifs, the deportation of students with political views, the defunding of universities and the promise to increase domestic energy (fossil fuel) production.
Later that day I attended a press conference at City Hall promoting the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act of 2025.
remains by far the safest place to be out of our own two home countries (Italy and the US) but such laws - invisible anti-trans weather of the state - force us to consider both how to keep fighting and how to escape.
The odds are long, but the effort is important.
A very noisy sounding, but fortunately free of the audio cut-outs that have beset many recent efforts.
Cable problems mean even the slightest breeze generates noise in the image - but this does result in the rather pleasing fact that the weather itself affects the image generated.
A chance also to see the image 'click' across the night time threshold.
You can see when significant breezes come in as striations over the image.
I dont see a lot, it is my first experience.
Today's sounding was mainly a test run, with noise and audio cutouts (the dark striations) proving a persistent issue - although the image was better than expected.
But I see a lot of clouds above balkan countries
Suspect these artefacts are a quirk of the new laptop I have been using, as previous devices (now sadly defunct) were fine.
Well we are facing a very long rainy season so i guess thats why we can see that much clouds in the image
Once again, a reminder of the intricate chain of systems that all need to align in order for a recording to be gathered and processed.
Today was one of the first warmer days of spring here in Kassel, Germany.
It was hard to get it , but still i got an awesome result even for my first time and about the weather we are facing a rainy season so we can see the clouds
But by the night it gets quite chill again.
We drive up the road to the English School Radio Club at dust, the sky a soft purple-blue, and a tower with several Yagi antennas comes into view.
Teaching undergraduate UK geography students in Nicosia, Cyprus is an experience of a clash between worlds- the worlds of Greek and Turkish Cypriots living across checkpoints and buffer zones, and those of students eager to extract 'data' on life in a divided city.
At ground level are two bungalows, one with the historical 'home' of the English School Radio Club, and a new renovated bungalow used today, as the older structure is failing.
Standing on the beach of the suburb of Varosha, yesterday, our guide Georgia pointed to her apartment building, framed by two once-regal hotels, to which she she has not been able to return, like all residents of Varosha, since the Turkish army arrived in 1974.
Nestor (President of the Cyprus Amateur Radio Society) and Demetris (President of the Nicosia Chapter of the Cyprus Amateur Radio Society) tell me of the history of the club, the days when one had to call the fire department to be lifted on a raised platform to fix the antenna.
She was due to be married on the day she had to leave her town.
They have a cabinet full of hundreds and hundreds of QSL cards, written postcards that confirmed amateur radio contacts between operators around the world.
She points out fields that once boasted dense orange groves, and speaks about the tradition of making sculptures from oranges in the shapes of dolphins and other animals.
"There are some here from countries that no longer exist!" they tell me, and I immediately find myself spreading out hundreds of QSL cards from the former Yugoslavia on a peeling green table.
She shows us the shop that had the "best cheese sandwich of the 70s- a delicacy", and the boutique where women would buy fur coats.
Next door, we power up the transceivers and I make three QSOs (radio amateur contacts) with hams in Slovenia, Hungary and Barcelona.
An abandoned kiosk marks the place where Varosha first served soft ice cream.
I speak the longest to the amateur in Barcelona, who tells me my contact is 'excellent' and makes good wishes to me and my family.
There is an eeriness both to being in such places on a research trip, and to seeing the ruins being photographed by the numerous passerby and members of the public.
While we listen and tune the radio, I hear many other stories of amateur radio on Cyprus, of speaking to amateurs in Syria, Egypt, Turkey and Iran, and of the politics of amateur radio and current educational programmes aimed to be inclusive to women and girls.
Many pose in front of dilapidated photo shops and ruined movie theatres.
The radio is so clear and engrossing - voice rising clearly on SSB through the 'whoosh' of the spectrum - that we are late for our dinner reservation.
We speak about ruins, aesthetics, dark tourism and what the gesture of taking a selfie in Varosha means.
Satellite: NOAA 15
Pass Start: 27 Mar 2025 12:24:38 GMT
Pass Duration: 14:55
Elevation: 54
Azimuth: 281
Solar Elevation: 14.8
Direction: southbound
Creation Time: 27 Mar 2025 12:26:28 GMT
Satellite Type: NOAA
Channel A: 2 (near infrared)
Channel B: 4 (thermal infrared)
Enhancement: HVCT
Ground Station: LIMA, PERU/South America
My experience was pleasant because in my exact location there are no weather problems, but in other latitudes of my country there are weather crises of various types.
It is unseasonably warm in Cyprus, as most residents tell us- at least ten degrees above the average temperature of springtime.
Equipment troubles finally subsided for today's pass, resulting in a pleasingly expansive view of Europe and parts of North Africa.
Saharan dust arrived in Nicosia over the weekend.
One interesting aside is that the wind was such that it blew through small gaps in the antenna, making distinctly musical notes in the process - can imagine a speculative art project in which the antenna is turned into a sort of instrument, working alongside the distinct notes of the NOAA transmission coming in.
"That's so MacGyver!" says a blonde woman with a dog when I explain my tape-measure Yagi-Uda antenna.
It would be quite the composition!
She and her friend / partner chat to me for a few minutes and walk off yelling back funding schemes that open-weather could apply to.
Some sun was peaking through.
It got a bit windy at times, but there was usually a nice gentle breeze.
Check it out!" I hear as they leave audible distance.
It was about sixteen degrees Celsius.
I wonder if I've just met an arts and culture boss of some kind.
The satellite pass was really interesting to see.
I had come out to the park around 10:20am to catch a NOAA-19 pass that would pass over London at 90 degrees in maximum elevation- an elevation I have only rarely seen in my whole career capturing satellite images.
The experience was quite grounding - being connected to an orbiting machine in the sky.
A boy's football team is practising in my usual spot, so my reception is perhaps not as perfect as it normally is when I can see a perfect diagonal North-South across the Downs.
Software problems caused frequent glitches in the audio stream, resulting in this rather "striated" sounding, despite an otherwise excellent signal.
Spring is everywhere today, in shooting daffodils and unfurling leaves.
A reminder, if there ever was, of the fragile chain of material structures and processes that enable these activities - and of how this fragility emerges from their status as constantly performing 'agents' in the world, rather than the typical image of technology as always fully tamed, always fully obedient to human imperatives.
A twiggy plant that I had previously identified as a Serbian Lilac in my front garden reveals itselt to be a sycamore tree as its leaves unfold.
This is my first reception of NOAA-15 through a Yagi-Moxon Antenna.
The alps curve with sharp icy edges, highlighted against the otherwise dark land surfaces of Europe.
Captured a satellite pass today from the Santa Monica pier.
Around campus, and across parks in London, purple and yellow bulbs are pushing through the grass.
Sunny and 16°C, a typical March day.
I fight the urge to lie down on the grass and smell them up close, aware of surrounding students.
Two months after the fires that leveled most of Pacific Palisades it is hard to tell anything happened in the rest of the LA area.
A very low 22 degree pass on a cloudless March afternoon.
The pier is full with the usual sight-seers.
After weeks of being trapped under a sheet of grey the scattered blue light of the sky is so very welcome.
Bike riders and volleyball payers do what they do.
I sit listening to the beeps of the pass watching a sleepy Bumble Bee wave around after his winter rest.
You have to know where to look for the evidence.
Yellow Hazel catkins tremble on a slight breeze and seem to vibrate in time with the click of the radio waves.
At the water's edge interesting patterns are made of burned vegetation and ash.
For this brief moment, everything is connected.
The new presidency is hard at work making us look the other way with declarations of the Gulf of America and Mount McKinley.
11 degrees Celsius
54% humidity
1032mb
Apparently in America there are now only two genders.
First notably warm day of the year, unusually so in February, at 15C.
Meanwhile thousands of government jobs and agencies are being canceled.
Services related to education, the National Parks and medical research are no more.
Malfunctioning equipment cut off both the start and end of the transmission recording - which also survived a complete computer crash.
And the Coast Guard Academy can no longer mention climate change in any of their trainings.
Mostly sunny skies and 16°C - pretty normal for a southern California February.
Some sunlight was very welcome after many days of freezing, rainy weather.
After 8 months of no rain, the last 3 weeks has helped to finally put out the fires and bring the area out of fire danger.
As I tracked NOAA-18 over the Atlantic at only 31 degrees maximum elevation to the west, three women and a dog came over to ask what I was doing.
This image was collected by a group of secondary school students who attended an Applicant Visit Day at Royal Holloway.
One of them turned out to be a former physics teacher and professor, and we discussed satellite orbits.
During the pass, Meteor MN2-3 made an appearance on the same frequency as NOAA 18!
The small, short haired dog kept bouncing across my laptop.
A second recording just after NOAA 19 passed our horizon.
During the pass I thought of a recent rebroadcast of a 1970s radio interview in which the host described February as a month that is 'honest'.
NOAA 19
clear sunny blue sky with 7pmh winds.
It doesn't lead you to think that things are any different than they are.
Keeping the antenna close to our bodies helps to receive a clearer signal.
It is miserable, and everyone knows it.
Standing in the sun with our eyes closed and listening to the sound is meditative.
Cheerful holidays like Mardi Gras are balanced by Ash Wednesday.
Fascinating to see the image and imagine ourselves as a body in a green field, but also a global body in this vast sky
If you make it through February, the host said, you will make it through the year...
Heavy winter over the Netherlands, it's been weeks around zero; the dry air can get through anything.
Receive location: Lublin, Poland
Time: 18:38
Software: SDR++
Hardware: RTL-SDR v4, dipole antenna on window
From above, NOAA19 beams through a wide mantle of clouds, they seem settled and a attached to the European continent- yet I've rarely see them swirling so fast, hiding then revealing our sun every hour.
Yesterday the pressure over London climbed to 1034 hPa.
Received with a remote SDR
As I cycled to London Bridge, it felt like anything in the air was being pushed out, even flung out, of the air above the city.
Cloudy, just like the typical British weather, also a bit cold.
I could see a dark cloud in the distance but as I cycled its shape got smaller and smaller, fleeing.
And I did see heavy clouds in the image.
The temperature had also dropped several degrees.
Cloudy, windy, a little bit cold.
Everything felt to be in motion, an intensity of forces.
As I left the house at 6:30am today, the coldness remained but the pressure had dropped.
Today in the UK, the weather was cold and grey, but while experiencing this, we were receiving ticking sounds from a satellite and converting them into an image.
During my lecture in Atmospheres: Nature, Culture, Politics, the rain suddenly arrived, pelting the classroom’s porous windows with great urgency.
The resulting image of the sky was striking and different from the one outside, blending technology and nature.
‘Hello rain!’ I said in my lecture.
The climate crisis is evident in my community with more erratic weather patterns, storms, and rising pollution.
During a break I cracked a window and observed two muntjack deer grazing placidly on the field below.
