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Comment by lwneal | Hacker News Reader

The article describes how to receive weather imagery directly from satellites using an SDR. It's a fun project, and surely useful if you don't have Internet access.

However, if you do have Internet access, GOES-16 [1] provides a beautiful full-color live feed of the Earth which you can easily download with wget/curl. For example, paste the following:

    wget $(curl -s https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk.php?sat=G16 | grep -o -e 'https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/FD/GEOCOLOR/[0-9]*_GOES16-ABI-FD-GEOCOLOR-1808x1808.jpg' | head -1) -O earth.jpg && open earth.jpg

It's fun to use as a live-updating wallpaper or background.

[1] https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk.php?sat=G16

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The only fix to your script is to use `display` command to open image (NOT `open` command).[0]

    wget $(curl -s https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk.php?sat=G16 | grep -o -e 'https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/FD/GEOCOLOR/[0-9]*_GOES16-ABI-FD-GEOCOLOR-1808x1808.jpg' | head -1) -O earth.jpg && display earth.jpg

And here is my resulted preview.[1]

UPD: Found that this CDN[2] also has static links to latest image, so script could be much more simplified by dropping `curl` and `grep`:

    wget -c https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/FD/GEOCOLOR/1808x1808.jpg -O earth.jpg && display earth.jpg

[0] https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001720.htm

[1] https://i.imgur.com/gFaVvhz.jpg

[2] https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/FD/GEOCOLOR/

You can also avoid using the file:

  wget $(...) -O - | display -

I combine this and 3 other satellites on my twitter bot into daily videos if you're interested.

https://twitter.com/earthin24

Cool! Got any multi-day/week/month videos?

This works on MacOS without wget:

    curl $(curl -s https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk.php?sat=G16 | grep -o -e 'https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/FD/GEOCOLOR/[0-9]*_GOES16-ABI-FD-GEOCOLOR-1808x1808.jpg' | head -1) -o earth.jpg && open earth.jpg

https://gist.github.com/surendharreddy/4264bc1f971680c355efa...

Fixed it

Do you know any reason this wouldn't work with zsh? I'm getting

  zsh: no matches found: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk.php?sat=G16

Sorry, I just changed the original until it worked in MacOS in the default bash terminal. I kinda hate shell scripting to be honest.

Zsh is trying to expand the glob, either quote it or prepend the command with “noglob”.

Ah, that was it. Much appreciated.

If one just wants the latest 1808x1808 jpg, this seems simpler:

     wget https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/FD/GEOCOLOR/1808x1808.jpg

source: https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/FD/GEOCOLOR/

Don't know why, but today this CDN page seems like lost its SSL-certificate and now Firefox prevent loading this page due to “Untrusted Connection”.

Strange, but yesterday I had no such issue.

The certificate for cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov expired on 1/13/2020.

Error code: SEC_ERROR_EXPIRED_CERTIFICATE

It looks they were using a free certificate from Lets Encypt. These only last for a few months.

Lets Encrypt only does "Domain Validation" so the registrant of the domain name is the only thing they check. They do not issue certificates for IP addresses.

https://140.90.107.147/GOES16/ABI/FD/GEOCOLOR/

This website works without a domain name. The traffic is still encrypted. How do we know this is really NOAA running the website at this IP address? We can check and see that the IP address belongs to AS 6629 and that AS belongs to NOAA.

It is arguable this information provides better "authentication" than the Lets Encrypt certificate. It is certainly easier to fraudulently gain control over a domain name from a domain name registrar than it is to fraudulently gain control over an IP address block from a regional internet registry or via BGP hijacking.

GOES-16 covers America, if I see it correctly (currently on mobile, sorry).

Does anyone happen to know if there is something comparable for the other side of the pond, e.g. Europe?

I tried to search ESA, but haven‘t found anything (again, on mobile, so that might be the reason).

From the article:

> The satellites’ orbits are configured such that one of the three passes within almost every point on the globe every three hours.

So these cover Europe too.

That's correct, thank you - but this only applies to the raw satellite link. The data itself is not available for download for the european region, afaik - that was what I was asking for. :)

But the view displayed on the website isn't changing. There's an "east" page displaying an amazing view of South America and a "west" page displaying mostly the Pacific Ocean. Images supposedly update every ten minutes, but those are the only two views you get.

Some of the Landsat ones have a web service to download any covered area of earth. They pass over the same area about every 14 days though, so you won’t get a life feed of a location.

Trying to find that as well!

The best I could find for now is the EUMETSAT feed[1], but it is updated every hour and not as good as GOES-16 at night.

[1]: https://eumetview.eumetsat.int/static-images/MSG/RGB/NATURAL...

Both GOES and MSG (the EUMETSAT version) have similar abilites at night (the both rely on infra-red)

The GOES nighttime image is not a real image, but a composite of the IR band (similar to [1]) and a night lights image (probably from VIIRS [2]).

You could do something similar with MSG if you wanted (e.g. [3])

[1] - https://eumetview.eumetsat.int/static-images/MSG/IMAGERY/IR1...

[2] - https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=-112.54695174385678,...

[3] - https://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/?sat=meteosat-11&z=0...

Found https://github.com/cameronleger/goes16-background, works well.

Good, but it is Python-way ;)

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