Hacker News Reader

Comment by celoyd | Hacker News Reader

I made this, and I’m happy to answer questions. (And to politely ignore contentious remarks about how I characterized GOES-R.)

View on HN

I'd love to have something like this as an animated desktop wallpaper - but it should be moving much slower. Are you aware of a movie file that I could use for this?

I wrote a script that downloads the live (well, every 10 minutes, with 30 minutes delay) tiles from the himawari-8 website and update my background with it. Gnome is nice enough that it refreshes the background when the configured image changes.

I'm waiting for the solar eclipse in March, it should be (indirectly) visible. http://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/solar/2016-march-9

Sounds nice, do you have it up somewhere?

Now on https://github.com/glandium/himawari-wallpaper (I'm not actually sure the eclipse will be visible on the cut I'm using)

Thanks!

Try xplanet.

Xplanet can render to the background and keep an updated view of earth. At some point I obsessed over having current cloud cover images overlaid and that looked really nice. It can even render sun reflections.

Thanks for the super informative FAQ in Credits/About - for others visiting the site, be sure not to miss it on top left!

Thanks! This was increadable to watch over and over again. I'm so used to highly compressed video, that the detail in this was staggering.

Is there a good public reasonably live feed of this data? I found the 800x800 8 bit pngs, and I found information on the restricted access full sized 103 gigabyte per day feed.

Is there a good public reasonably live feed of this data?

Right here: http://himawari8.nict.go.jp

How awesome would it be if we had that kind if quality available from all "sides"... (Ok, yes, one could mostly build displays of blue spheres. But fancy ones ;))

Any reason why we don't have several of these at all points?; or do we and I just do not know about it? - p.s. love the site, thank you

Europe’s weather authorities are extremely stingy with their nearest equivalent data – their attitude is that the observations are for science or for money, not for silly websites.

Feel free to provide an email address for us to complain.

Click "Credits/About" on the OP.

Fantastic! Thank you! I've cropped several as desktop wall paper.

Why not make a cron job that does that automatically every couple minutes ;)

That's the plan! It just need to be intelligent enough to find interesting lighting.

There's another satellite, DCSOVR, that takes photos of the daylight side of the earth several times a day. It's not as up-to-date as this footage, but it's always fully lit. http://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Wow, DSCOVR. typo

In addition to the link posted by celoyd, you can get access to the full data stream you mentioned by filling out this application form[0].

There are also some heavily processed images from that data available from NOAA[1] - the "Geocolor Full Disk" is the best, it's half-resolution (5500x5500). The green filter on Himawari's camera doesn't correctly capture the green color of vegetation, which is why OP's video looks browner than you might expect. So this product attempts to correct for that by creating an artificial green channel made of a combination of other channels[2]. It also attempts to correct for Rayleigh scattering[3], so this is basically what the Earth would look like if the atmosphere suddenly disappeared (except for the clouds :P). The night portions of these images are a different kind of false color composite: the clouds come from two infrared channels, white are high ice clouds and red are low wet clouds; the city lights are (sadly) just a static overlay from existing data.

And (shameless plug) I've been playing with applying motion interpolation algorithms to these NOAA images to create smooth, high resolution video that can be played much slower. The Farneback optical flow algorithm[4][5] seems to work very well. (Lots of) videos available on my Youtube channel[6], code/details available here[7][8], blog post coming soon :)

[0] http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/ptree/registration_top.html [1] http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/ramsdis/online/himawari-8.as... [2] http://www.goes-r.gov/downloads/ScienceWeek/2015/Presentatio... [3] http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/research/goes-r/proving_grou... [4] http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:273847/FULLTEXT01... [5] https://github.com/dthpham/butterflow [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rOwjn87edI&list=PLrmCQL5hEL... [7] https://github.com/dandelany/animate-earth [8] http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=8063&...

Wow. Great stuff! Is there a good way to use one a video at a very low framerate (perhaps 0.1-1 fps) with low resource requirements as animated wallpaper on Ubuntu/Linux?

Oh, hello! I enjoyed your motion interpolation experiments, and I look forward to the blog post.

Awesome work and thanks for the helpful links. Would make a really cool background / screensaver to loop the prior days imagery in HD :)

This is great, but it would be nice if there were a way to slow it down a bit.

document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 0.1;

Cool demo. On my machine though (high-dpi monitor, win10, firefox) the globe is enormous and way too big for the browser viewport. If I zoom out enough with ctrl-minus it is about the right size, so I think you're sizing the page elements incorrectly in some sort of dpi-unaware fashion. Can probably work around this with devicePixelRatio.

I know it’s odd, but I wanted it not to be visible all at once.

FWIW, I really appreciated this. I think it helped add to the feeling of enormity, and helped me to realize the resolution of the video.

FWIW I don't think ‘enormity’ means what you think it does!

‘Enormity’ refers to severe moral transgression, like you could say, “It wasn't until after the war had ended that the German people became aware of the enormity of Hitler's concentration camps…” That's closer to what the word means.

I appreciate that choice, but maybe add a zoom out button to notify people that you can in fact zoom out, because I didn't even realize I could see the whole earth (Also, this made the 'what is that bright spot moving east to west' question very confusing).

<ctrl>-

Repeat as necessary.

Went too far?

<ctrl>+

When done, <ctrl>0

(on chrome at least)

Thanks for making it! I tried a little with your scripts and got to these results: (original files available if you ask)

1 Day in 4400x4400: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4_orOM8zOg

1 Month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwN2KJcQfoQ

11000x11000 Sunset: https://i.imgur.com/wMIXQvC.jpg

11000x11000 Daylight: http://i.imgur.com/y1zTyU2.jpg

How come you pointed it at Australia and not NZ :(