[HN Gopher] Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite ...
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Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of
earths surface
Author : seesawtron
Score : 26 points
Date : 2020-07-20 19:53 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zoom.earth)
(TXT) w3m dump (zoom.earth)
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| As a Floridian, I look forward to live viewing death from above,
| sometime soon.
| taylorlapeyre wrote:
| Another great site for viewing earth weather patterns:
| https://earth.nullschool.net
| neave wrote:
| 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/
| supernova87a wrote:
| I would hardly call it the "live" you would expect. As soon as
| you zoom in to any level of <100km detail it reverts to years-old
| imagery. It's more like a "live" view if you were to look at the
| entire Earth at once from the Apollo capsule...
| qeternity wrote:
| 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.
| supernova87a wrote:
| 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.
| qeternity wrote:
| Large weather patterns are the first thing that jump out to
| me. But perhaps the knowledge that the blue marble you're
| looking at is mere minutes old builds a stronger connection
| and appreciation for it.
|
| Either way I think it's cool, even if it lacks the Jason
| Bourne resolution.
| neave wrote:
| I'm the developer of Zoom Earth. "Live" is shorthand for
| "near real-time". But, you're right. Most visitors simply
| want to see their house from space. Which is
| understandable, but also kinda depressing. They could look
| at _anywhere in the world in near realtime_, but they wanna
| see what their roof or garden looks like.
|
| Meteorologists love it though.
| jjulius wrote:
| Sure, we can't zoom in, but I thought that this was pretty
| cool. Yeah we've seen photos of the planet from a distance,
| but printed maps and Google/Apple/et. al.'s map software
| condition us to forget about how widespread cloud cover is.
| So, to me, an "average person", it's interesting to see the
| world "as-is" right now - the various storms around the
| world, the fact that the cloud cover near my house is
| something I only ever think about locally but, upon viewing
| this, is so obviously part of a much, _much_ bigger system
| that extends thousands of miles beyond my locale, the neat
| kind of horizontal "line" of clouds stretching around the
| planet along the equator, etc.
|
| Yeah, I'm not going to spend a lot of time checking this
| out, but it's still really neat for a few minutes.
| arkanciscan wrote:
| Planet does it better https://www.planet.com/gallery/
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(page generated 2020-07-20 23:00 UTC)