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Comment by cryptarch | Hacker News Reader

At first I thought it was a data donation, but it seems like it's only API integration with support.

Still pretty cool as an alternative to Bing satellite data, I guess it's pretty unlikely we'll have open-licensed satellite data in the near future.

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Most of the EU satellite stuff is open licensed, lookup Sentinel II. Various wavelengths and new data every 5 days (so if it's cloudy you can try again).

It's not the most user-friendly though, you have to download large swathes at a time.

NASA has datasets that are easy to integrate into maps. See https://gibs.earthdata.nasa.gov/

Sentinel II images are great and provide many wavelengths. The resolution is a bit low for tracing though I think.

NASA Landsat program is a great example of Open Data. It's important to remember that US taxpayers funded the creation, launch and operation of the satellites. EU Sentinel is similar. So the imagery is paid for, as users we just don't have to pay twice.

DigitalGlobe's GeoEye-1 was also partially funded with taxpayer money in exchange for unlimited military access and exclusive use of the highest resolutions. It is time the general public got to reap the benefits too.

Satellite or plane?

My understanding is that most civilian satellite imagery is pretty low resolution. The aerial imagery used on most maps sites is taken from planes -- there's clear parallax in some areas of the image, and far too much perspective in general to be taken from an orbital platform.

DigitalGlobe has multiple satellites with ~30cm pixels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldView-4

The layers here are satellite imagery. Mapping sites definitely bring in any other sources that make sense though.

I haven't looked at it a great deal, the "Premium" layer appears to be more carefully produced with the "Standard" layer favoring fresher imagery. So both are nice resources.

It's a couple completely new imagery layers. Digital Globe has lots of imagery and these layers appear to have different imagery for lots of the areas I've checked. Digital Globe is offering these two layers to OSM editors to improve OpenStreetMap, and it's great.

thank you! the service will get better over time as we update imagery and provide metadata.

As well as Bing, there is also aerial imagery from Mapbox. So this is another option for us, which is great.

In many ways, aerial imagery is much better for OSM than data. Trying to conflatuate 2 data sources (DG & OSM) would be a massive headache.

Check out Radiant: https://www.radiant.earth

What am I checking out? Radiant doesn't appear to actually be anything or do anything. That page appears to be a vague description of a thing that purports to provide access to data but doesn't actually provide any information on how to get it.

It's an initiative that has been backed by the Gates Foundation and Omidyar Network. There have been a few press releases about the goals of Radiant, e.g. [1][2]. I shared the link with the intent of simply pointing to their mission, which is to provide free access to a wealth of geospatial data.

I don't know where the project stands at present, so I dont have an objective measure to discriminate between what they claim to be doing and what they're actually doing.

Coincidentally, I had a meeting in DC today at the Omidyar Network and Radiant was mentioned briefly in the context of providing startups with a way to bootstrap without spending large chunks of money on acquiring geospatial data.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-technology-satellites-huma...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/bill-gates-melind...

I upvoted because this does sound interesting, but as another commenter said, at the moment it appears to be vaporware (or at least invite-only, since they ask people to email code@radiant.earth). Is there something real behind this or is it a scam to get newsletter subscriptions?

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