Some details: It combines near real-time images from multiple geostationary satellites, updated every 10 minutes (with a delay of ~30 minutes). NASA GOES satellite for the Americas, Japan's Himawari-8 for Asia and Meteosat in Europe/Africa. Zoomable up to 500m per pixel. Beyond that it uses historical imagery from Microsoft and Esri.
Oh, that's interesting. ESA says they distribute the Sentinel data free of charge as far as I can tell. So I guess the issue is that you'd need to download and host the data yourself, rather than just do an API call to someone else's archive?
I wouldn't call it the "live" you would expect (although depends on what you were expecting -- I wasn't honestly expecting a live view of "anywhere on Earth", but at least some level of detail). As soon as you zoom in to any level of <100km detail it reverts to years-old imagery. I guess it's understandable -- since when you get to that level, clearly they are picking/choosing the imagery that's cloud-free, etc.
It's more like a "live" view if you were to look at the entire Earth at once from the Apollo capsule...
Well the only way to get “live” imagery at any level of perceptible detail is to be a three letter agency. Even the highest levels of private sector aren’t tasking satellites with that level of latency.
Sure, that's fair. But what / who then are they trying to sell the idea of with the phrase "live"? Is any average person really interested in a "live" view of the whole Earth, such that it would be meaningfully different or changed compared to the static blue marble photo we're all familiar with? I think we all know what we're interested in when we think of "live"... things at the <<1km level.
Sure, we can't zoom in, but I thought that this was pretty cool. Yeah we've seen photos of the planet from a distance, but printed maps and Google/Apple/et. al.'s map software condition us to forget about how widespread cloud cover is. So, to me, an "average person", it's interesting to see the world "as-is" right now - the various storms around the world, the fact that the cloud cover near my house is something I only ever think about locally but, upon viewing this, is so obviously part of a much, much bigger system that extends thousands of miles beyond my locale, the neat kind of horizontal "line" of clouds stretching around the planet along the equator, etc.
Yeah, I'm not going to spend a lot of time checking this out, but it's still really neat for a few minutes.
Edit: User qeternity responded to your post as well, and I'll also echo their comment about how seeing this whole planet as something that's minutes old building a strong connection/appreciation is another great point.
I'm the developer of Zoom Earth. "Live" is shorthand for "near real-time". But, you're right. Most visitors simply want to see their house from space. Which is understandable, but also kinda depressing. They could look at _anywhere in the world in near realtime_, but they wanna see what their roof or garden looks like.
I guess it's pretty normal to check your own place because you know it well enough to rate the quality of the imagery. In this case, whatever you're using offers better and more recent resolution than Google Earth at greater speed so it's my New Favorite Thing.
> They could look at _anywhere in the world in near realtime_, but they wanna see what their roof or garden looks like.
I'm sure, they are interested in more. They might pick their home first, as they are familiar with it and can compare the pictures you provide with their mental image. You have to gain their trust first.
From which year are the cloudless images shown when deselecting the live/daily layers? There seems to be one per month but all from the same year, right?
It's interesting to see how winter is taking hold of the planet - but a little bit disappointing that I cannot compare snowy areas between different years.
I'm super happy to see this website personally, seeing the weather patterns and being able to timestep through them historically is really awesome. I'm a sailor, so that's my angle.
Large weather patterns are the first thing that jump out to me. But perhaps the knowledge that the blue marble you’re looking at is mere minutes old builds a stronger connection and appreciation for it.
Either way I think it’s cool, even if it lacks the Jason Bourne resolution.
Back when drones were a relatively new thing and I lived in a country where people don't get upset about this kind of thing, we sent a drone down to see how busy our local pub was.
Is it theoretically, and practically possible for a private company to task a satellite with this level of latency/detail? Are there laws/regulations in this regard? Or is it more a technical/financial barrier?
When they were looking for the missing Malaysian airliner, there were "fresh" (I guess days old) satellite images for people to look through, although the detail level was not that great.
I think a commercial satellite imaging company supplied the images for free.
But also... I'm super confused about the nighttime imagery.
Looking at daytime imagery from this afternoon over the US, everything looks legit -- it looks "real", shadows from clouds get longer as the sun gets lower in the sky, shadows on mountain ranges change, etc.
But as soon as it transitions to night, all realism goes out the window. Urban areas are absurdly bright, clouds are still blindingly white on top, the pattern of lights don't change even a tiny bit throughout the night... it's like it's no longer using photos but combining a static nighttime image with radar-detected clouds drawn on top. The gradient between daytime and nighttime also seems highly artificial.
Do other people agree that the nighttime imagery is totally simulated, not photographs at all? I'd just kind of like to see a version that showed real nighttime imagery, even if it was mostly super-dark (but they could HDR it which would be fine too).
> I'd just kind of like to see a version that showed real nighttime imagery, even if it was mostly super-dark (but they could HDR it which would be fine too).
The image that’s being used here (for the US imagery) is what CIRA calls GeoColor: true-color imagery during the day (with simulated green channel; the GOES-R satellites don’t have a green channel), and multispectral IR composited on top of a static city lights image at night.
This is using GOES imagery for "live" North America which uses multispectral IR for night [1] but True Color for day. Once you pass a certain zoom level, it switches to historical imagery from Microsoft.
Side note, you can receive GOES images straight from the satellite yourself with a $30 SDR, a $30 LNA, and an antenna made from scrap (or ~$100 if you're not handy).
I've always been curious what a real day+night satellite image looks like. The simulated ones always show urban areas as absurdly bright.
Does anyone have links to satellite imagery that shows the actual full real transition from daytime to nighttime, at a constant camera exposure so without exaggeration?
This isn't constant exposure throughout but at some points you can see the transition pretty clearly such as 21:32, some great shots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM2wtte1JRE
Yes, the night side uses a combination of infra-red imagery with a static image of the Earth at night. Without that image all the landmass and cities would disappear into black, so it helps give the IR imagery context. And it looks nice. It’s a common technique called GeoColor.
A friend of mine was putting in a subdial and phoned up some gov department to find out the lat and long for his property.. after being put through about 5 different departments the last guy he got said "where do you want it?" And he repeated his address, the guy rhen said " no I mean where in your back garden? Go out side and stand where you are going to install it and i will give you the exact lat and long" yes this guy was watching him live! this was back when the first home phone detatchable handsets were out.. a long time ago. He never did find out who he ended up talking to..
There's nothing live about the images you get when you zoom in, so at some point I guess "live" (within 24 hrs?) just goes out the window and is replaced with Google Maps or similar.
I thought it was super cool. Love the other suggestions on other comments too. We should encourage such posts if not for anything but for allowing a tiny space for such discussions. Really hoping hackernews doesn't change its rules and member enforced etiquettes.
I'd imagine you could build something like this but it would get harder the smaller it is. Some sort of plastic sphere with rear projection from multiple projectors inside, warped to fit the globe (the more projectors, the more even focus would be around the full area of the globe). Project live sat imagery on inside of globe and view from outside.
I guess ideally it would use some fancy-pants spherical OLED to get around projection issues but I don't know if such a thing has ever been fabricated yet.
edit: just looked this up and apparently there have been spherical OLED displays and most search results are, indeed, demoed with globes.
I'm sorry, but that "Let us use cookies or you can't use this web site" button is not legal. If you're trying to appease GDPR, then that is not enough. You need to be able to use the web site after refusing cookies.
Quite interesting! It felt good to see a satellite imagery without an overlay of labels, roads, and border lines that we are accustomed to. It's not really real-time if you zoom in, but it's good nevertheless.
High resolution will be older imagery. You won’t be able to see your house in near real time unless you pay to task a satellite from a commercial provider like Planet Labs.
There’s a Planet Explorer, https://www.planet.com/explorer/. I worked on building it a few years ago. Unfortunately you have to have a Planet account and I believe those are paid only.
I have to disagree. That giant frame on the bottom looks to be unremovable. We lose that whole half the screen to "HEY LOOK AT THIS". With that is a sticky top that keeps dropping down to cover what little viewing room we have.
Maybe I'm missing something but this looks like one of the worst layouts I've ever seen.
It also tracks the latest storms and hurricanes https://zoom.earth/storms/