How to find out if something is legitimate or not?

[dolphins4life]

I am trying to find out if the youtube feed that reportedly shows Earth from the ISS is real or not.

Googling has not helped me find the answer.

[Spider-Dan]

Maybe you should start with finding out if the ISS itself is real or not.
If we can fake the moon landing in a 1969 Hollywood studio, a fake space station in 2018 seems pretty easy.

[Sunstroke]

Maybe you should start with finding out if the ISS itself is real or not.
If we can fake the moon landing in a 1969 Hollywood studio, a fake space station in 2018 seems pretty easy.

The International Space Station is real...I've seen it in a number of movies recently. 

[MyGodWearsAHoodie]

If NASA is the source legit.  If NASA doesn't provide a feed of the iss, then how would someone have one?

[fyo]

d4l, you make it hard not to tease you a bit...

Okay, you have a stream and you want to find out if it's authentic or not. It claims to show a live feed from the ISS. Now, you don't actually give us the link to the feed, so I'll assume it's the top one when googling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtU_mdL2vBM

It's currently showing a beautiful video from what certainly appears to be the ISS with the solar panels off to the sides with a cloudy blue-white half-sphere.

[It's showing Earth with a curvature and since we all know the Earth is flat, clearly it's fake, but let's ignore that for a moment ]

You could do any number of things to verify the authenticity. You could check NASA's own website, see if they have a feed or link to one (they do). Does it match? (no, it doesn't).

In fact, right now, the live stream is Pretty F*cking Boring. You know why? 'Cause the ISS is over Eastern Russia where it's night. The location of the ISS isn't exactly secret and you can look it up easily enough. So, no, the feed linked above is NOT a live feed from the ISS.

Now, the ISS moves quite quickly and will soon be into the light again. On the other hand, that youtube clip is showing the ISS crossing the terminator into darkness RIGHT NOW, so it could be an ISS feed delayed by 45 minutes (the ISS sees one sunset and one sunrise every 90 minutes) or it could be much older. I'm not going to expend any more energy trying to pin it down, but if you wanted to, you could look for events such as rocket launches to get a very precise time or at least get a rough idea from the terminator location as the ISS crosses (a 24 hour day doesn't divide very nicely into 90 minutes, so the ISS will cross the terminator over different parts of the Earth depending on the date).

If you want a link to the real live ISS feed, NASA has you covered:

https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESRS/HDEV/

Modified to add: Under US copyright law, all works created by the US Federal Government or its Agencies are legally in the public domain. As a result ANYONE can take the video from the NASA site and stick it on youtube and earn dollars from ads.

[fyo]

Whoa... I had the youtube feed running in the background and Aliens appeared! No, just kidding, but there was a glove that appeared to adjust the camera. Considering the rarity of spacewalks and how well-documented the activities performed are, I'd say that give you a pretty solid idea of when the video is from. Or at least a limited set of possibilities.

I also noticed that the night-time part of the feed was over WAY too quickly, so either the youtube feed is running sped-up (which would mean it would have to be on a loop) or it is slowing the video down during the day and speeding it up at night (since night is boring and the feed wants to attract users to generate advertising revenue).

[Sunstroke]

I'm going to step outside of the space station in 30 minutes for a smoke break, so if you see me waving on the feed, it's legit.

[fyo]

I SEE YOU. That's cool