A local intelligence console pointed permanently at one town: Basingstoke, Hampshire, England.
Inspired by gods-eye-view (global spatial intelligence) — inverted. Instead of the whole Earth, everything about one place, down to the contour interval. OS grid square SU85. 51°15′49″N 01°05′27″W.
The entire app is a custom canvas engine — no Cesium, no Leaflet, no map library. Every pixel is drawn from real data.
python3 server.py # -> http://127.0.0.1:8123
That's it. No build step, no npm install, no API keys.
One town, four lenses — TACTICAL (phosphor green ops console), RELIEF
(hypsometric hillshade from real SRTM), RADAR (PPI scope with live-aircraft
blips fading on a 4-second sweep), NIGHT OPS (red-light, preserve-your-dark-adaptation).
| RELIEF — hypsometric SRTM hillshade | RADAR — PPI scope, live sweep |
|---|---|
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| NIGHT OPS — red-light console |
|---|
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Real terrain, not a basemap. NASA SRTM one-arc-second tiles, stitched at ingest into a 120 m grid, rendered client-side as a Lambertian hillshade with hypsometric tints. 10 m contour lines are extracted with marching squares in the browser, from that DEM. Every contour here came off the Space Shuttle radar payload in 2000.
OS National Grid, properly. Cursor position is live-converted to an OSGB36 grid reference (SU 85545 54120 style) via the full Airy-1830 transverse-Mercator series plus the Helmert 14-parameter OSTN15-transform approximation. Not UTM wearing a costume.
Live feeds (no keys, no signup):
| Feed | Source | Refresh |
|---|---|---|
| Live air traffic up to ~150 km — real callsigns, altitude, heading, squawk | OpenSky Network | 15 s |
| Seismicity M2.5+ with distance lines measured from Basingstoke | USGS | 2 min |
| Weather, wind, cloud, lightning potential, sunrise/sunset daylight % | Open-Meteo | 5 min |
| ISS position, ±48 h ground track, next visible pass computed over your town (real SGP4) | CelesTrak TLE + satellite-js | 30 min (snapshot frozen otherwise) |
Basingstoke-only intelligence:
- Next ISS pass over Basingstoke: countdown, rise/peak/fall azimuths, max elevation — SGP4 propagated in your browser, not an iframe from a website.
- Station analysis: distances & bearings from Basingstoke station to Waterloo, Reading, Southampton, Gatwick… computed with real geodesy.
- A Radar PPI scope centred on the town: range rings, real motorway geometry, sweep-synchronised aircraft blips that fade as the beam passes.
- Synthetic traffic flow — moving dots on the real M3 / A30 / A33 / A34 geometry from OpenStreetMap.
- Tall-structure layer: OSM masts plus curated UK giants (Emley Moor, Belmont, Winter Hill…) drawn as height-scaled spikes.
- Submarine cables layer (TeleGeography) — Basingstoke is a national fibre hub; it's honest to show where the internet lands.
- Real OSM POIs: pubs, the ICT-famous campuses, Beaver County, Danebury hillfort and Old Down barrow as gotos — click and the camera flies to the Iron Age.
index.html / styles.css console chrome, CRT scanlines, boot sequence
server.py static + /proxy (allowlisted CORS shim for CelesTrak)
scripts/fetch_data.py one-time ingest: SRTM z12 tiles -> terrain.bin.gz,
Overpass -> roads/rail/places/water/urban/towers,
Natural Earth -> coast/counties outlines
scripts/build_tles.py epoch-frozen satellite catalogue (~11,700 sats)
assets/satellite.es.js satellite-js v5 (SGP4/SDP4)
src/geo.js ENU projection, OSGB36 grid refs, Helmert transform
src/terrain.js DEM load (gzip streaming), hillshade, marching squares
src/live.js OpenSky / USGS / Open-Meteo / TLE pass solver
src/main.js canvas renderer, radar scope, panels, interaction
Zero runtime dependencies served from npm; zero keys; zero tracking.
server.py proxies only an allowlist of open data hosts and only on 127.0.0.1.
The live layers are live. The offline layers are snapshots — refresh anytime:
pip3 install rasterio # one time
python3 scripts/fetch_data.py # ~4 min: terrain, roads, rail, places, towers, water, admin
python3 scripts/build_tles.py # satellite catalogue snapshot- Terrain: NASA SRTM 1 arc-second, AWS
elevation-tiles-prod(public domain). - Streets / rail / POIs / masts / water: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), via Overpass.
- Coastline & county outlines: Natural Earth 10m public vectors.
- Submarine cables: TeleGeography (public mirror).
- Live air traffic: OpenSky Network — research licence, non-commercial.
- Quakes: USGS Earthquake Hazards Program. Weather: Open-Meteo.
- Orbits: CelesTrak (TLE) + satellite-js (SGP4).
- Grid math follows OS GB, A guide to coordinate systems in Great Britain, v5.
Basingstoke: first recorded as Basingas' wood in the 8th century, a Domesday market town, and for a while in the 1980s the office-park capital of Southern England. Now with its own spy-console.