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Ask HN: Where to find hi-res images of earth?
I just discovered how to create dynamic backgrounds for MacOS (https://itnext.io/macos-mojave-dynamic-wallpapers-ii-f8b1e55c82f). The author of that post built a custom background that shows the planet, lit by the sun, relative to the users location. The satellite images come from Himawari-8 though, and show Asia mainly.
Therefore, I wondered whether there are any other sources for satellite imagery like this.
- shpx 8y agoESA's image of the week archive is nice. A lot of the pictures are false color but you can sort by number of views. http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Sets/Earth_observation_image_of_the_week http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Sets/Earth_observation_imag... Planet.com lets you download like 70 highres sample images of ports, farms, oil rigs and cities if you give them a fake email address. https://info.planet.com/download-free-high-resolution-skysat-image-samples/ https://info.planet.com/download-free-high-resolution-skysat... NASA's composite photos of the Earth at night are classic https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/NightLights https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/NightLights related, there's Aerial which lets you use videos of the earth from Apple TV as your macbook's screensaver. The readme links to a linux and Windows port.
- 9dev 8y agoThank you for these links, didn't know the ESA gallery yet. However, they don't provide a 360deg view - to compose one of these dynamic wallpapers, you'd need sixteen shots, ideally from the same perspective. That way, your screen would show the earth as it'd look right now, just from a little further up :-)
- 100ideas 8y agoHow are you thinking of making the wallpaper live? Poll the server every 15 minutes for a new image, and if there is one, use @mczachurski's script to regenerate the background image .heic file?
- 9dev 8y agoInitially, I only intended to find images roughly showing Europe (I don't travel that regularly), but hey, that'd be even cooler! Might even create a little script so everyone can get a dynamic background of their personal earth position! Polling every ~85 minutes would be fine though, since the 16 images are cycled across the day every 1.5 hours.
- 100ideas 8y agoThere's also the ISS HDEV livestream from the space station. The stream is only up when the ISS is on the Earth's daylight side, so ~45 min of its ~90 min orbit. https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESRS/HDEV/ https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESRS/HDEV/
- 100ideas 8y agoHi! I just came across the author's repo was thinking the same thing! https://github.com/mczachurski/wallpapper https://github.com/mczachurski/wallpapper I think the best source would be GOES-R / GOES-17 full disc geocolor images. I'll post back with a list of potential servers.
- 100ideas 8y agoColorado State provides a website that serves near-realtime processed data from various weather satellites: http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu they offer a tool called Slider that lets users create overlays of various satellite image streams. You can access imagery from GOES-East, GOES-West, Humawari-8, and JPSS. Here is a loop of Goes-17 ("goes west") Full Disk Geocolor images captured every 15 minutes for a full 24 hours, starting 9:00 PM PST 2018-10-16 to 10:00 PM PST 2018-10-17: https://col.st/sNSct https://col.st/sNSct Note that GOES East geocolor images seem to render a synthetic city lights texture + live cloud coverage for night-time images. Goes West is just dark. NOAA publishes high resolution Goes-16 ("goes east") images every 15 minutes, and seems to lag about 30-60 minutes behind the actual time of capture by the satellite. Here's the latest: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/index.php https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/index.php
- 100ideas 8y agoHere is a "Master List" of GOES data sources http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/goesdata.html http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/goesdata.html
- 100ideas 8y agohttps://github.com/znorman17/goes-tools https://github.com/znorman17/goes-tools: JS tools for accessing GOES data located on Earth on AWS.
- 100ideas 8y agoNASA's DSCOVR satellite is positioned such that it is always between the earth and the sun, so it always has a view of the sunny side of the earth. I think its' EPIC product produces a full-disk image every hour. https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov
- 100ideas 8y agoRelated project: animate-earth https://github.com/dandelany/animate-earth https://github.com/dandelany/animate-earth This repository is an experiment in applying optical-flow-based motion interpolation to processed RGB satellite imagery from Himawari-8’s AHI imager, with the aim of regularly producing high-quality smoothed videos from these images, and sharing them with the world. The final products can be found on this Youtube channel[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Mlo4zfmEITcNoCpBKfEfg/playlists https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Mlo4zfmEITcNoCpBKfEfg/pla...], updated nearly daily.
- 100ideas 8y agolastly, @maxogden wrote a small script that downloads the latest "CIRA GeoColor iages generated by Colorado State University from the NASA GOES-16 satellite raw imagery" for the last 24 hours, stitches the tiles into high-res composite images, adds text overlay, then uses ffmpeg to create an animation. https://github.com/maxogden/goes-16-cira-geocolor https://github.com/maxogden/goes-16-cira-geocolor