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

by seesawtron • 6 years ago

399 81 6 years ago

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

neave14• 6 years ago

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/

jrichardshaw2• 6 years ago

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.

neave14• 6 years ago

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

supernova87a3• 6 years ago

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...

qeternity2• 6 years ago

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.

supernova87a3• 6 years ago

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.

kfrzcode• 6 years ago

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?

blhack2• 6 years ago

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

nl• 6 years ago

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

Twirrim• 6 years ago

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

arkanciscan3• 6 years ago

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

kyle_morris_• 6 years ago

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

arkanciscan3• 6 years ago

Planet gets new images every day.

geuis2• 6 years ago

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.

blhack2• 6 years ago

There's a free trial account.

arkanciscan3• 6 years ago

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

WarOnPrivacy2• 6 years ago

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.

WarOnPrivacy2• 6 years ago

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.

geuis2• 6 years ago

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

lmilcin• 6 years ago

Thumbs down.

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

neave14• 6 years 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.

maskedinvader• 6 years ago

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.

chrisshroba• 6 years ago

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

kranner• 6 years ago

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.

neave14• 6 years ago

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.

flipflopsrawr• 6 years ago

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

azinman2• 6 years ago

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

ctdonath• 6 years ago

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

njsubedi• 6 years ago

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.

greggman3• 6 years ago

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

https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse

basicplus22• 6 years ago

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..

momirlan• 6 years ago

nice prank

oriettaxx• 6 years ago

funny, but what is a "subdial" ?

basicplus22• 6 years ago

Sundial

crazygringo2• 6 years ago

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).

ancientworldnow• 6 years ago

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

crazygringo2• 6 years ago

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?

JonathonW• 6 years ago

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.

neave14• 6 years ago

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.

aussieguy1234• 6 years ago

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

Tronno• 6 years ago

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

mgoetzke• 6 years ago

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

sidyapa• 6 years ago

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

neave14• 6 years ago

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.

supernihil• 6 years ago

What about free amazon 52cm sqaure resolution satelite images?

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

hnarn• 6 years ago

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.

neave14• 6 years ago

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.

cocoggu• 6 years ago

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

matthewhartmans• 6 years ago

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

neave14• 6 years ago

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.

mnw21cam• 6 years ago

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.

dr_dshiv• 6 years ago

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

ookware• 6 years ago

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

soylentcola• 6 years ago

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.

seesawtron• 6 years ago

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

Jemm• 6 years ago

Sailor here. Thank you.

culopatin• 6 years ago

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

chkaloon• 6 years ago

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

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

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