Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes | Hacker News Reader

Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes

nytimes.com

237 pointsrevorad51 comments

I wrote a simple shell script[0] to scrape and output the latest image.

It uses the tiles from their online satellite map[1], and can output images in increments of 1x1, 2x2, 4x4, 16x16 tiles (each tile being 550px by 550px). Here is an example with 2x2 [2]

If you have any suggestions or bugfixes, feel free to fork or comment.

EDIT: Also works for a single tile[3], also clarity.

[0] https://gist.github.com/Syrup-tan/1833ba1671c7017f0d59

[1] http://himawari8.nict.go.jp/

[2] https://denpa.moe/~syrup/himawari8.png

[3] https://denpa.moe/~syrup/himawari8-single.png

I wish there were a pair of these satellites separated by a couple thousand miles/km, so we could view these images with next-gen, hi-rez VR goggles and see the surface and cloud topography with enhanced depth.

Let's do a sanity check on this.

Cloud height is at about 60,000 feet maximum (in the tropics http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/clouds/height_max.htm). Let's be generous and say this is 20 km maximum height.

Earth's diameter is 12742 km. The clouds are about 0.15 % of this size, relatively speaking. The full images are about 11k by 11k, so we can say that 1 px is roughly 1 km. This means that the clouds will be on the scale of 20 pixels, roughly.

You know what, this might actually work.

I've always wondered if https://xkcd.com/941/ actually works and if anyone has done it yet

the max tile value is actually 20x20 (i.e http://himawari8.nict.go.jp/img/D531106/20d/550/2015/07/10/2...) making it the 11000x11000 res.

Is anyone busily tapping away at a Windows port of this? I'm enthusiastic, but it would take me all day/week

Just give it a shot, you could translate it line for line into Ruby, and use ImageMagick or something. Don't sell yourself short, it won't take as long as you think!

You could probably run it in a cygwin shell (after installing curl and ImageMagick).

Here is a 11000x11000 = 121 million pixel 'full disk' image [1] (lower resolution at [2]) captured at 0340 UTC on 7 July 2015 by the Himawari-8 satellite, which I found on a blog post [3]. Real-time images from the weather satellite can be found here [4].

[1]: http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015...

Mirror of [1]: http://d-h.st/cgHl

Warning: the JPEG file[1] is ~ 70MB in size.

[2]: http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015...

[3]: http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/blog/archives/18804

[4]: http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/mscweb/data/himawari/sat_img.php?ar...

I'm scraping the site and generating lots of 11000x11000-resolution images in PNG format, available for you to download here [0].

Refer to filenames for date and time when the photos are taken. The file size of the images (taken at around 0300 UTC each day) is up to ~ 150MB.

[0]: https://mega.nz/#F!r4JTxYJT!NAzBOkuBt2tuyYdnz8hXQg

Nice. Japan needs better weather data; too many hurricanes and too much coastal development. From geostationary orbit, the resolution has to be low, but it's always on.

The US has two geostationary weather satellites, which are usually parked roughly over Panama and Hawaii. Neither has good coverage of Japan. Korea's COMS satellite does, though. China has several, including one that's usually pointed roughly at Taiwan.[1] Right now, you can see the hurricane that's due east of Shanghai.

[1] http://www.hko.gov.hk/wxinfo/intersat/fy2e/satpic_s_vis.shtm...

I didn't realise they were lacking in weather data. Seeing tangentially related projects like their supercomputer Earth Simulator Project [1] led me to (falsely it seems) believe they were likely also sufficient in that area.

Beginners question - does their inclination (prohibitively) affect the efficiency of lower orbit weather sats?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Simulator

Why does geostationary orbit infer low resolution? Or do you mean "from orbit" in general?

Geostationary satellites orbit much further away (~35,786 km) from Earth than non-stationary satellites (~2000 km).

Will there be a place where they can be downloaded? A live Planet Earth desktop wallpaper would be pretty great.

Check this out: http://www.jma.go.jp/en/gms/largec.html?area=6&element=1&tim...

edit: The largest image resolution seems to be 800x800 (well, 800x815, with the attribution footer). I wonder if the new satellite's imagery isn't part of this feed yet? I hope that's the case, because it would be incredibly cool to be get such high-res images.

I hope that they upload the images to some server that we can grab and make animations with. I can watch this all day.

A daily youtube video would be cool. I used to do that with construction webcams.

I was thinking exactly the same thing... And here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chA6M321dsY

This is fantastic, great job!

I wrote a script which downloads the latest image in a large resolution[0]

If you can set your wallpaper from the commandline, or have the wallpaper refresh from an image on disk, you could use it for a live wallpaper.

I'm also going to have the scraper check if the image has changed every 10 minutes and have it update at [1] if it has, but the image will only be in 1,100px x 1,100px resolution.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9867655

[1] https://denpa.moe/~syrup/himawari8.png

The Earth is so beautiful.

I saw GOES-R http://www.goes-r.gov/ and the pronunciation I heard in my head made me think of Ghostbusters.

I am convinced that that was intentional, though I have no proof to back that up.

I have always hoped that someday Google Earth would just be live.

That day any notion of privacy will stop existing.

It really depends on the resolution, doesn't it?

Unless you, I don't know, go inside?

And never go outside?

Its already assumed that there is little or no privacy in public spaces.

Privacy is on a sliding scale. There are certain assumptions we rely on when we go out in public.

Imagine, for example, some future where you were effectively under constant surveillance when in "public". Where your every action, every movement, every utterance was recorded, categorized, transcribed, data mined, and then put into a feed that anyone could subscribe to. That's what the complete absence of public privacy looks like, and it's not great.

Yeah, living in London you have several cameras looking at you permanently. You can see a bunch of them via the TFL api as well.

But, AIUI, those cameras aren't networked together. They're all owned by different people. TV shows like Torchwood that show some agency tracking someone across the city using CCTV are showing something that can't possibly happen in real life, because there is no one centralized authority (or even handful of authorities) that have access to most of those cameras. Not to mention the cameras themselves are just video, and not particularly stellar quality at that.

Of course, I could be wrong, maybe someone in London really can track someone across town using the CCTV cameras, but the above is what I understand from what other people have explained in the past.

So imagine London?

http://www.pss-1.com/

It shouldn't be.

Most of the high resolution "I can see my car from here" images are from aeroplanes.

So my first thought was (will this replace the doves by space labs). Which was an earlier story on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158295

It won't because these are geostationary satellites (if I read the post correctly). So you'd need at least 3 of these to get a good image and that's not even considering some of the bigger issues with this. I also don't think the resolution is on par. But the images will be really cool to see.

Link to space labs. https://www.planet.com/story/

Uhhh, this spacecraft is for a totally different application.

Planet Labs doves are in LEO for low earth observation. This Japanese one is a weather satellite to monitor the area around Japan.

Yup that's what I was getting at, my first thought was that they'd be competing then I looked at the use cases and I wanted to point out that they were different, but I might have been the only one who thought that in the first place :-)

the resolution difference is quite big. Planet labs satellites captures with something like 1mx1m resolution.

This satellite has a resolution of about 500mx500m

I think it is actually 5m. 1m gets pretty close to spy satellite territory. The planet labs lens only has a focal length of <30cm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Labs

Yeah 3-5 meters apparently.

And i would assume spy satellites can do much better than 1m.

According to wikipedia spy satellites has a estimated resolution of about 10 cm.

Modern Spy Satellites certainly do. However, there are rules that govern what a non-governmental entity can put into space.

Are there any other sources with constant up to date imagery like this? This looks great and would like to see other current satellite images, and maybe use them for visualizations or some projects.

Is it common to lock a satellite into a stationary orbit?

Satellite TV and communications satellites commonly do this -- otherwise your satellite dish would have to track the satellite across the sky as it moves.

Defense Support Program satellites are also in stationary orbits so they can watch fixed regions for nuclear missile launches with infrared cameras.

Yep! Unless you want access to the poles or multiple sides of the planet for some reason.

I find that we can do this sort of thing amazing. However on the animation the fact that the terminator line changes angles is a bit unnerving.

The resolution of the "full disk" (i.e. whole earth) natural color images appears to be 11000x11000 pixels every 10 minutes. I can't find any realtime access to these images though - could anyone else?

They do have a cloud service for disseminating the imagery, but only for "official use":

http://www.data.jma.go.jp/mscweb/en/himawari89/cloud_service...

"Until Himawari-8 becomes operational, NMHSs wishing to release Himawari-8 data and products to the public are requested to consult with JMA beforehand."

Edit: Here is at least a tile-zoomer with some sort of realtime access to high-res imagery: http://himawari8.nict.go.jp/

These are great! I've been looking for something like this for a long time and I could never find anything out of NOAA that had this kind of time resolution. Here about a big storm on the east coast? What does it look like from space? Gotta wait to see whether someone will do a press release.

You might find http://realearth.ssec.wisc.edu/ useful. Just be sure to click on either the "Presets" or "All" tabs within the "Layers" section.

Oh, and if you decide to use the animation feature just try to be patient with the way it loads in the individual times--once you've pulled down everything the animation should look a good bit nicer.

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