NATS Timelapse Video: The UK Airspace On An Average Day

This mesmerising footage, created by NATS, the organisation in charge of UK air traffic control – depicts a single day in the skies above Britain and illustrates just how crowded they really are.

The “data visualisation” video is created using actual flight records. It begins with a fleet of planes arriving from the west (“early morning transatlantic arrivals enter UK airspace”) and soon the screen is a complex and ever-changing web of arrivals and departures, including 3,500 flights into and out of London alone.

It shows holding stacks above each of the major airports, military training flights over the east coast and inside a designated RAF testing area, as well as helicopter flights between Aberdeen, the world’s busiest heliport, and Britain’s North Sea rigs.

“Following the success of our two data visualisations – Europe 24 and North Atlantic Skies – we’ve taken a lot of time to think about where to go next”, explained Brendan Kelly, head of operational policy at NATS.

“Both were designed to give an overview of the daily complexity and volumes of air traffic across the UK and Europe and to do so in a way that was cinematic and exciting to watch. I think we were able to do that to great effect, but we now want to take you a little deeper."

"Our airspace is busy, complex and there is a lot going on. Each year we manage around 2.2 million movements, peaking at over 8,000 a day (although there are around 7,000 on this particular day)."

"Our tour then take us around the UK, including the other major airports, our two control centres in Swanwick and Prestwick, some general aviation traffic and examples of military training off the east coast of England and near to North Wales."

Voyager 3: Amateur timelapse of Jupiter 're-enacts' Voyager 1 1970 flyby

This animated gif shows Voyager 1′s approach to Jupiter during a period of over 60 Jupiter days in 1979. 

Credit: NASA

Back in the 1970′s when NASA launched the two Voyager spacecraft to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, we were all mesmerised by a movie created from Voyager 1 images of the movement of the clouds in Jupiter's atmosphere.

Voyager 1 began taking pictures of Jupiter as it approached the planet in January 1979 and completed its Jupiter encounter in early April.

During that time it took almost 19,000 pictures and many other scientific measurements to create the short movie, which you can see below, showing the intricate movement of the bright band of clouds for the first time.

Now, 35 years later a group of seven Swedish amateur astronomers achieved their goal of replicating the Voyager 1 footage, not with another flyby but with images taken with their own ground-based telescopes.

"We started this joint project back in December of 2013 to redo the NASA Voyager 1 flyby of Jupiter," amateur astronomer Göran Strand told reporters.

"During 90 days we captured 560 still images of Jupiter and turned them into 90 complete maps that covered the whole of Jupiter's surface."


Their newly released film, above details the work they did and the hurdles they overcame (including incredibly bad weather in Sweden this winter) to make their dream a reality.

They called their project "Voyager 3."

It is really an astonishing project and those of you who do image processing will appreciate the info in the video about the tools they used and how they did their processing to create this video.

The Swedish team of amateur astronomers who compiled the ‘Voyager 3′ project. 

Credit: Göran Strand