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Ask HN: Where to find hi-res images of earth?

5 points by 9dev ↗ HN
I just discovered how to create dynamic backgrounds for MacOS (https://itnext.io/macos-mojave-dynamic-wallpapers-ii-f8b1e55c82f). The author of that post built a custom background that shows the planet, lit by the sun, relative to the users location. The satellite images come from Himawari-8 though, and show Asia mainly. Therefore, I wondered whether there are any other sources for satellite imagery like this.

12 comments

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shpx
ESA's image of the week archive is nice. A lot of the pictures are false color but you can sort by number of views.

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Sets/Earth_observation_imag...

Planet.com lets you download like 70 highres sample images of ports, farms, oil rigs and cities if you give them a fake email address.

https://info.planet.com/download-free-high-resolution-skysat...

NASA's composite photos of the Earth at night are classic

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/NightLights

related, there's Aerial which lets you use videos of the earth from Apple TV as your macbook's screensaver. The readme links to a linux and Windows port.

9dev
Thank you for these links, didn't know the ESA gallery yet. However, they don't provide a 360deg view - to compose one of these dynamic wallpapers, you'd need sixteen shots, ideally from the same perspective. That way, your screen would show the earth as it'd look right now, just from a little further up :-)
100ideas
How are you thinking of making the wallpaper live? Poll the server every 15 minutes for a new image, and if there is one, use @mczachurski's script to regenerate the background image .heic file?
9dev
Initially, I only intended to find images roughly showing Europe (I don't travel that regularly), but hey, that'd be even cooler! Might even create a little script so everyone can get a dynamic background of their personal earth position! Polling every ~85 minutes would be fine though, since the 16 images are cycled across the day every 1.5 hours.
100ideas
Hi! I just came across the author's repo was thinking the same thing! https://github.com/mczachurski/wallpapper

I think the best source would be GOES-R / GOES-17 full disc geocolor images. I'll post back with a list of potential servers.

100ideas
Colorado State provides a website that serves near-realtime processed data from various weather satellites: http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu

they offer a tool called Slider that lets users create overlays of various satellite image streams. You can access imagery from GOES-East, GOES-West, Humawari-8, and JPSS.

Here is a loop of Goes-17 ("goes west") Full Disk Geocolor images captured every 15 minutes for a full 24 hours, starting 9:00 PM PST 2018-10-16 to 10:00 PM PST 2018-10-17: https://col.st/sNSct

Note that GOES East geocolor images seem to render a synthetic city lights texture + live cloud coverage for night-time images. Goes West is just dark.

NOAA publishes high resolution Goes-16 ("goes east") images every 15 minutes, and seems to lag about 30-60 minutes behind the actual time of capture by the satellite. Here's the latest: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/index.php

100ideas
NASA's DSCOVR satellite is positioned such that it is always between the earth and the sun, so it always has a view of the sunny side of the earth. I think its' EPIC product produces a full-disk image every hour.

https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov

100ideas
Related project: animate-earth

https://github.com/dandelany/animate-earth

This repository is an experiment in applying optical-flow-based motion interpolation to processed RGB satellite imagery from Himawari-8’s AHI imager, with the aim of regularly producing high-quality smoothed videos from these images, and sharing them with the world. The final products can be found on this Youtube channel[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Mlo4zfmEITcNoCpBKfEfg/pla...], updated nearly daily.

100ideas
lastly, @maxogden wrote a small script that downloads the latest "CIRA GeoColor iages generated by Colorado State University from the NASA GOES-16 satellite raw imagery" for the last 24 hours, stitches the tiles into high-res composite images, adds text overlay, then uses ffmpeg to create an animation.

https://github.com/maxogden/goes-16-cira-geocolor