The Wall: Geostationary satellites near-real-time animations | Hacker News Reader

The Wall: Geostationary satellites near-real-time animations

earth2day.com

215 pointsalas4426 comments

Made by the father of a friend with decades experience in satellite imagery. It works recombinining public data feeds from several satellites to create close to real time RGB views of the planet.

Most free data being from old satellites watching earth only a wavelength, the magic behind those breathtaking views is to recombine the data to create RGB impressions and correcting for the different spacial movements and orientation of satellites.

Some highlights in the gallery such as the California and Austrialian fires, as seen from space https://earth2day.com/TheWall/Gallery/gallery.html

> satellites watching earth only a wavelength

You a word there, friend.

Is there a reasonably priced service (for individual budgets and not corporation budgets) that would allow you to rent a satellite in order to for example count the number of Teslas that are out on the road in a given city in the United States?

not possible -- the "complete coverage" companies have to deal with clouds and other atmospheric elements. Good math helps a lot with creating landuse coverages, but you can never increase the detail as you are asking

You could use SAR to observe independent of lighting and climate. I’m not sure how good the coverage is right now but it’s improving (see Iceye and Capella). Resolution for car ID though… I’m not sure it’s up to that

Usually non-military satellites max out at 1 pixel per 30 cm, so the resolution will most likely be too bad to decide if it's a Tesla or not.

There are startups like Albedo attempting at 10cm satellite imagery, but apparently 3-4 years away from launching.

That might be too low of a resolution for RGB, I have a feeling that few cars would share the same spectral signature in the commonly measured bands. A lot of papers have been written on vehicle identification using SAR - so that would probably be the way to go.

Planet has some services that use machine learning to count ships and detect roads. I believe you might be able to run your own models on the data, but detecting teslas vs other cars would be difficult at current resolutions. Unfortunately not reasonably priced for individuals

humor me, what’s the angle - front running quarterly financial results?

The thing you describe is not front-running.

You’re right.

I am just curious how one could capitalize off knowing the number of Teslas on the road at any given moment.

I don't think its currently even in corporations budget ranges.

Not sure how much resolution military sat's have (I assume you are USA), but even with them it might be challenging to identify teslas from top down.

And don't forget about clouds.

If you need such good resolution, getting some survey planes, or maybe some drones, might be a lot more feasible.

And you could then take pictures at an angle, which would serve to easier identify teslas.

Note that modern reconnaissance satellites can take pictures quite far off-axis (as demonstrated by the Morison leaks to Jane's).

This is awesome, a great resource!

I've been watching the College of Dupage's satellite weather view [0] for the past year with wildfires and atmospheric rivers coming through.

Select a sector to zoom in to and a data product or combination and you have a nice animation of the recent satellite view [1]

[0]https://weather.cod.edu/satrad/

[1]https://weather.cod.edu/satrad/?parms=local-Tahoe-truecolor-...

In a similar vein, but more interactive and with weather overlays: https://zoom.earth/

Anyone know of "solar system simulation" software that allows one to explore all celestial bodies, probes, and satellites currently (and historically) in the solar system -- like a 3D program? I know NASA has Eyes but that's not so comprehensive (it doesn't have the JWST, for example)

Perhaps Stellarium? https://stellarium.org/

Celestia: https://celestia.space/

Stellarium's cool too, but it's more focused on what you see if you look up at the sky. Celestia's more of a broad "fly around the known universe"-type of simulator.

I‘m fascinated by "current" satellite images. The most enjoyable option I‘ve found is the FreshSat layers available in the Gaia GPS app. Being able to hold it in your hand while out and about and "look over walls", so to speak, is really fun.

They combine the free Sentinel and Landsat images, I think, and a few web services do that too, but none of them seem to work as well.

Hmmm I just downloaded this and signed up but I can only get topo maps for free.

Oh that's unfortunate. I just checked and FreshSat is listed as a "Premium" layer in the app. It's a good piece of software but not worth it just for what is essentially free data.

You can pan around the map a little bit here: https://www.gaiagps.com/maps/source/freshsat-cloudless/

And.... It's been hugged to death.

By HN? There's like 5 of us here. Must've been Reddit.

Wow, this is amazing!

Agree, this visualization is beautiful -- wow!

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