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

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/10/science/An-Image-of-Earth-Every-Ten-Minutes.html

by revorad • 11 years ago

237 51 11 years ago

nytimes.com

pavel_lishin2• 11 years ago

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

peter_l_downs2• 11 years ago

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.

warmwaffles• 11 years ago

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

Syrup-tan2• 11 years ago

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

bargl2• 11 years ago

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/

branchan• 11 years ago

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.

bargl2• 11 years ago

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 :-)

callesgg2• 11 years ago

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

This satellite has a resolution of about 500mx500m

blackguardx2• 11 years ago

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.

sosuke• 11 years ago

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.

bovermyer• 11 years ago

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

Animats• 11 years ago

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...

patrickmclaren2• 11 years ago

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

rktjmp• 11 years ago

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

ShardPhoenix• 11 years ago

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

state• 11 years ago

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

cporios• 11 years ago

That day any notion of privacy will stop existing.

JoeAltmaier2• 11 years ago

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

vlasev2• 11 years ago

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

chippy• 11 years ago

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

johansch• 11 years ago

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/

hyperion2010• 11 years ago

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.

interknot• 11 years ago

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.

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

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.

Syrup-tan2• 11 years ago

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

slagfart• 11 years ago

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

patrickmclaren2• 11 years ago

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!

icebraining• 11 years ago

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

SiVal• 11 years ago

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.

vlasev2• 11 years ago

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.

shpx• 11 years ago

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

zoneo• 11 years ago

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.

chriscampbell• 11 years ago

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

capnrefsmmat• 11 years ago

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.

Retra• 11 years ago

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

tomkwok3• 11 years ago

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...

tomkwok3• 11 years ago

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

eseymour• 11 years ago

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.

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

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