Get the location of the ISS using DNS

Summary

I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability space, the more prosaic reality is that they're just boxen in data centres. They have a physical location. Got a tricky machine which is playing silly-buggers? Wouldn't it be nice to know exactly where it is? That way you can visit and give it some percussive maintenance. Enter the DNS LOC record! The snappily titled RFC 1876 is an experimental standard. It allows you to create a DNS record which specifies the latitude and longitude of your server. Of course, some data-centres are very tall and some are underground. So it also contains an altitude parameter. The standard allows for a minimum altitude of -100,000 metres - deep enough for any bunker! The maximum altitude is 42,849,672 metres which is high enough to allow it to be used on satellites in geostationary orbit. So, as a bit of fun, I decided to create where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io It isn't a website. You can't ping it. There's no way to interact with it except by using DNS. Yup! You can use a DNS query to get the (approximate) location of the International Space Station! Linux and Mac users can run: dig where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io LOC And receive back the latest position of the ISS: ;; ANSWER SECTION: where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io. 1066 IN LOC 47 24 53.500 N 66 12 12.070 W 430520m 10000m 10000m 10000m The DNS records are updated every 15 minutes on a best-effort basis. The lovely people at N2YO have a website which allows you to track loads of objects in orbit. They also have an easy to use API with a generous free tier. Calling https://api.n2yo.com/rest/v1/satellite/positions/25544/0/0/0/1/&apiKey=_____ gets back the latest position: JSON{ "info": { "satname": "SPACE STATION", "satid": 25544, "transactio...