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Maxar's Open Satellite Feed

tech.marksblogg.com

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For anyone interested in very high res Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) open data, Capella space also provides catalogues in STAC [1]. There's also ICEYE and Umbra space who provides sample data from each of their website.

[1] https://stacindex.org/catalogs/capella-space-open-data#/

If you're federally funded it's possible to get access to maxar imagery for free, although it's not so straightforward (you have to go through some sort of broker, generally speaking, I go through the polar geospatial center). I also found that Planet is pretty generous with their academic accounts...

Great post Mark. Long time reader - really enjoy your content.

To any readers - Any thoughts on how I can get satellite imagery of Aniak Alaska at a very low cost? I've looked into the sentinel imagery and it works -- unfortunately difficult to find enough images without high cloud cover. I could work through lots of images to piece together a solution -- but even then, I'd love to get higher resolution. Thank you for any guidance!

I've seen skyfi.com which seems promising but haven't decided to purchase.

Very low cost for better than Sentinel-2 is hard.

If 3m is OK then you could look into PlanetScope imagery, although getting small amounts as a hobbyist might be a pain.

I had a look at SkyFi, and there is some 75cm imagery in Aniak that you could buy for 20 bucks (for 5km^2). I doubt you can do better than that.

Tasking VHR imagery can be costly, as there is usually a large minimum order size. For archival, you just have to hope someone else took a picture of what you are interested in.

Thank you Fnands. I appreciate it. I will have to go back to SkyFi -- I must have missed this 75cm imagery.

Lemme know if you don't find it. I could have shared the link but the URL is ugly, lol.

There is also some 30cm Pleiades Neo imagery that I found in Airbus's archive, but I don't think SkyFi offers PNeo.

I wish they could come back and support Open Street maps again....it became really hard to map the 3rd world.

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/maxar-imagery-not-work...

I always imagine people looking at weather patterns and change of land over time to bet on yields. But that price tag of a photo... if nobody bought their images I guess they could crunch the data themselves/sell that.

There are also the free images you can download yourself via SDR.

SDR?

Software Defined Radio.

Are they really broadcasting the imagery back down from the satellite without encryption?

I should have specified, I was referring to the NOAA ones that are public

These images are super far away though eg. entire Earth so idk

I will add for the U.S. based satellites the disc images are from the NOAA GOES sats which are in a Geosynchronous orbit but there is also the NOAA-15/18/19 which are lower in a Sun-synchronous orbit and you get a strip as it passes over.

They're publicly funded public data. But the images are mostly only useful for tracking cloud cover.

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tracking-and-decoding-guide-for-noaa...

I have to guess that a lot of the sales are things like "please look at this specific plot of land once a week" or something way cheaper than having someone go take pics or something.

Like if your job is to make a bunch of money predicting crop futures you could probably justify spending.... $10k/year on pictures I bet? Though you gotta be careful with this kind of reasoning and not double-count your profits. And like all of this kind of stuff I bet that Maxar lives off of people with inflated budgets being able to ask for stuff.

There's a lot on info/tooling on AWS' open data site as well for exploring these datasets:

https://registry.opendata.aws/maxar-open-data/

I really like the format of this post; very direct and to the point, listing instructions one by one, all very tidy. I'm sure the process of getting to this point wasn't nearly as straightforward as the blog itself was!

When doing Humanitarian OpenStreetMap I notice that the imagery is often from Maxar. Did OSM have some kind of deal with them, or maybe it was a donation?

They stopped sharing: as of July 2023, Maxar has revoked API access to its imagery for OSM editors. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Maxar

Oh, that sucks. I've been using Maxar as a default for many years now. About ten years ago we had much higher resolution imagery from Bing. I know because I mapped things that are not visible on current imagery like fences and poles.

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