xkcd #3156: Planetary Rings

Title text:

If you don't know where you are on Earth, the angle of satellite dishes can help constrain your latitude. If some of them are pointing straight up, you're probably near the Equator, right under the ring.

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Source: https://xkcd.com/3156/

explainxkcd for #3156

If you don't know where you are on Earth, the angle of satellite dishes can help constrain your latitude. If some of them are pointing straight up, you're probably near the Equator, right under the ring.
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[–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

Wow thanks! If you like this, on Monday I'm planning to release an update that will let you rewind the viewer all the way back to 1959 and see the first launch of Sputnik. Then let it play forward to today sped up so you can see the growth of satellite counts. Also a new public API to fetch the TLEs from any date. I'm hoping this will let folks do interesting stuff with all that data - maybe AI training or research projects etc.

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