Watcher in the Sky

Inspired by Advisory Circular by John Wiseman. After running Advisory Circular myself for a while (back in the Twitter days), I decided I'd try my hand at writing a similar bot but adding the ability to use different "jobs" to detect various different types of flights.

John's original code was written in Clojure, with a current rewrite in Rust. I decided to build mine in TypeScript to brush up on and improve my TypeScript skills.

As of now, the bot only monitors circular-ish flights, looking for aircraft that are circling using the Airplanes.live API but can easily be modified to use a network available tar1090 aircraft.json. The bot then uses the BlueSky API to post the details of the flight and a screenshot of the flightpath.

Data is sourced from two APIs:

• Airplanes.live
• A local Pelias instance

What's in a name?

The name "Watcher in the Sky" is inspired by the band Ghost.

WIP

This code is very much a work in progress and will be refined as I work on it.

To-do:

1. Pull photo of aircraft from airport-data (if available)
2. Write nicer-reading post text
3. Add detection of aerial photography/imaging flights (zig-zags)
4. Create configuration of watched aircraft list for specific tail numbers or icao

Example

This code is periodically running and posts to the BSky account @skycircles.bsky.social. I can be found on BSky as @sawyer.bike.