Ask HN: Where to find hi-res images of earth? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where to find hi-res images of earth?

5 points9dev12 comments

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.

View on HN

Related project: 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/pla...], updated nearly daily.

ESA'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_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...

NASA's composite photos of the Earth at night are classic

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.

Thank 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 :-)

How 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?

Initially, 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.

There'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/

Hi! I just came across the author's repo was thinking the same thing! 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.

Colorado State provides a website that serves near-realtime processed data from various weather satellites: 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

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

Here is a "Master List" of GOES data sources http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/goesdata.html

https://github.com/znorman17/goes-tools: JS tools for accessing GOES data located on Earth on AWS.

NASA'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

lastly, @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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com