Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of earths surface | Hacker News Reader

Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of earths surface

zoom.earth

399 pointsseesawtron81 comments

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.

It also tracks the latest storms and hurricanes https://zoom.earth/storms/

Can you use ESA Sentinel satellite imagery as an intermediate step? It's 10m ish resolution updated on a roughly weekly cadence.

I use it frequently (via https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/sentinel-playground/) to help plan backcountry trips around here, as it's great for seeing the local snow conditions.

I’d love to, but their API is currently cost prohibitive for a free-to-use website.

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?

Anyway, it's a cool website, nice work!

You’re exactly right. Sentinel Hub process a huge amount of data in real time, so it’s no small feat.

Yeah and hosting it by yourself is slightly non-trivial as the storage requirements are in the PB range.

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.

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.

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.

Meteorologists love it though.

Also, it's good for monitoring wildfires. For example, here are fires currently raging in the Arctic: https://zoom.earth/#view=67.86,151.46,6z/date=2020-07-20,am/...

Why not just say how old each image is, like with a color overlay? “Zoom past this level and you will be looking at 400 days ago” etc

It does - imagery is dated to the nearest month from level ~12 and higher. (See top left on desktop, bottom on mobile)

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.

So live/daily is for zoom levels 0-9, and the archive goes back 20 years to 2000. Zoom in, and older imagery dates will vary based on the location.

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.

Do you have a WMS interface?

> 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.

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 mean, at this level, it's not that different from Google Maps satellite view, right? I can see years/months-old imagery there too.

I for one would love to get a live view of the lineup at my nearest grocery store.

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.

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.

I mean if I could look at myself sitting in my own garden it would be unimaginably awesome.

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?

Planet Labs do this (planet.com) but $$$

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.

Check out planet labs. Not a government agency, and taking high resolution scans of the entire planet very frequently.

If you aren't a TLA there are options. Planet SkySat will give you 50cm resolution twice daily if you have budget[1].

Planet, Digitalglobe[2], Airbus[3] and others will give you similar or better without the ability to task collection.

[1] https://www.planet.com/50cm/

[2] https://www.digitalglobe.com/products/satellite-imagery

[3] https://www.intelligence-airbusds.com/en/8692-pleiades

Some of the "old" views are really quite old. Older than that visible in Google Maps, for example.

First of all, this is super super super cool.

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).

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).

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

Ah ha that explains it perfectly, thanks.

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?

> constant camera exposure

Sure, just take an image and color the night part completely black. Street lighting is around 10 lux -- sunlight is 100,000 lux.

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

> 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).

It wouldn’t just be super-dark; it would be black. The GOES visible light sensors do not produce any useful data after dark. (See it yourself: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk_band.php?sat=... ... this is the blue channel.)

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.

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.

This reminds me of a story..

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..

nice prank

funny, but what is a "subdial" ?

Sundial

This only goes by years not in 10 min increments but it animates

https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse

Another great site for viewing earth weather patterns: https://earth.nullschool.net

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.

Yes, near real-time is available up to 500m/pixel (level 8 zoom). To see higher resolution you can use planet.com but that’s a commercial service.

It's explicitly written under the website title that passed a specific level of zoom, images are updated daily. Still quite a nice service.

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've always wanted a physical globe with real-time high-res clouds. That is my personal marker of "oh, the future has arrived"

Not something in your own house just yet but how about this: https://informal.jpl.nasa.gov/museum/CP4SMP/dynamic-globe

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.

What I liked about this is the forecast feature of the movement of clouds/cyclones in the oceans:

For example here: https://zoom.earth/storms/douglas-2020/#layers=labels

Need current "live" feed of Three Gorges Dam. Could get real interesting soon.

I looked at a 2018 picture of my house and it is 100 percent not from 2018. Cars and patio furniture from past owner 4 years ago

Look at the bottom attribution... zoom in enough and it’ll switch to a big data provider with stale maps.

Sailor here. Thank you.

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.

Just checked my neighbourhood. The latest image seems very old, as a house that was constructed last year only shows up as a plot of land.

Sure enough, in the top-left it says the latest image is from November 2018.

Yep, it will be old at that zoom level. Zoom out to level 8 and you’ll get near real-time but you won’t be able to see your house.

What about free amazon 52cm sqaure resolution satelite images?

https://registry.opendata.aws/spacenet/

Did we hug the server too much? I’m getting a blank screen.

The location information seems to be a little off though, compared to google maps. By about 20' - 30' in my attempts to locate things

I may be mistaken but seems like you can see the dust cloud moving south from NYC if you go to 9/11/2001 AM

Very cool. Always amazed at how much cloud cover there is. Using Google Earth and maps, you forget about that.

This is super cool! Can you see planes in flight? Could be good for tracking missing planes.

Not quite, but you can see the contrails. Example: https://zoom.earth/#view=40.174,-136.065,7z/date=2020-07-20,... Change the date to see them being created.

This is awesome! If only it could show the world as a globe to add even more realism.

Tried from Australia, the imagery of my neighbourhood is from 2018

Past a certain zoom level it displays historical imagery. Zoom out to get recent photos.

For where I am, the latest image was taken in May, 2018

Yes, images of your house/area will be older. Near real-time imagery is only available at lower zoom levels.

It takes a long time to take satellite/aerial photos of everywhere on the planet in high resolution, so 2018 is quite good in the geospatial industry.

As a Floridian, I look forward to live viewing death from above, sometime soon.

Hurricane season is one of the few things I like about this state - that and the 15 minutes of not-summer.

Thumbs down.

Picture for where I live (Warsaw, Poland) seems from more than a year ago.

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.

Planet does it better https://www.planet.com/gallery/

How is planet better? Clicking on https://zoom.earth/ takes me directly to the overall imaging of the earth.

Planet seems to take you to a landing page with interesting things to look at. Not that that's bad, but interested to hear what's better about it

Planet gets new images every day.

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.

There's a free trial account.

So did I! Did you work with Trevor, or Alessandro?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com