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A space station camera has recorded extremely detailed video of North Korea's capital city

A space station camera has recorded extremely detailed video of North Korea's capital city

urthecast iris ultra hd video camera space station

$4

Iris, an ultra-HD video camera strapped to the International Space Station.

From a lofty perch about 250 miles above Earth, an ultra-high-definition video camera called Iris is recording unprecedented views of the planet - including the capital cities of secretive regimes like North Korea.

The camera was launched by a company called $4 in 2013, but it wasn't until 2014 that Russian cosmonauts finished attaching Iris to the International Space Station (ISS).

Wherever the ISS flies, Iris is watching and recording $4 at a resolution of about 1 meter per pixel. That's enough to see the elongated shadow of a person turning a corner, or a large pile of leaves.

On May 30, 2016, UrtheCast recorded 4K footage of North Korea's capital city, Pyongyang, which is home to $4. The company released the footage on Thursday.

Here's a still-image overview of what it saw:

The video distorts tall objects, which seem to move or morph over time.

This is because the space station is flying overhead at 17,500 mph, and software is correcting the images to fixate on a specific point.

You can see the effect in this clip of Pyongyang:

In the shot below, you can see the white-stoned Kumsusan Palace of the Sun (right) - "the mausoleum in which North Korean leaders are laid to rest," UrtheCast wrote in an emailed press release.

The glint of sunlight reflecting off road structure is also visible:

And in a zoomed-in section of that shot, says UrtheCast, one of its image engineers caught "the shadow of a person walking within the grounds" of the mausoleum.

You can see the person turning the corner at center:

Of course, what UrtheCast can see pales in comparison to the spooky level of detail that commercial satellites can pick up. Military spy satellites can peer even closer.

A lot of eyes in the sky $4 - but the US government limits the resolution of images that can be sold.

However, companies are $4 to permit them to sell those ultra-detailed images to anyone who wants to buy them, so long as they're cleared as non-threatening to national security.

NOW WATCH: $4

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