ISS Notifier is a free and open source Telegram bot that notifies you of ISS sighting oppertunities at your location.
Try it out: Send /start to the ISS Notifier bot.
- Get a list of upcoming ISS sightings at your location.
- Subscribe to get reminders about sighting events. Reminders are send an hour before and when a sighting event is taking place.
- Change your preferred location by simply sending the bot your new location as a pin.
By default, when subscribed, users are notified an hour before any ISS sightings and when the ISS can be seen.
All sighting oppertunities are scraped from NASA's spot the station. Thanks NASA!
This tutorial is assuming you are using Linux.
Please Note: You need to create a bot using BotFather. The bot id and api token needs to be entered in the issBot.py file, where indicated.
Install the python venv package, on Ubuntu I had to:
apt install python3.10-venv
this may be different for your distribution.
Create a virtual enviornment in the project's root directory by issuing the command:
python3 -m venv venv
Then, activate the virual enviornment:
source venv/bin/activate
Install all the requirements needed by the ISS Notification Bot:
(venv) $ pip install -r requirements.txt
Run the ISS Notification bot by:
(venv) $ python3 issBot.py
To let the bot run in the background, press Ctrl+Z, type bg in the command prompt Enter and then disown and Enter. You can now close your SSH session.