
Full Disk Images of Earth from GOES-17 - Jerry2
http://esorensen.com/goes-part-1/
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dreamcompiler
This kind of thing could replace some uses of blockchain. The pattern of
clouds on earth every day is unique, so anything that needs a timestamp with
1-day resolution could just tie it to a hash of today's cloud image pixels
gathered from many receivers around the world, each taken at noon from the POV
of a given geostationary satellite. That way one could prove that an event
took place no earlier than today, especially if you hash each cloud photo with
the hash of the one from the day before, which creates a cloudchain. The
chain's ordering is verifiable from multiple sources and created wholly
external from any human agency or pseudo-random number generator.

Speaking of which, you could also use the pixels (or some permutation of them)
as a random number seed that changed every day.

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baddox
Is it any better than any other source of random or extremely difficult to
predict data? Seems like you could just use data from the stock market or some
radio antennas or telescopes.

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dreamcompiler
The stock market is human-generated so somebody with enough money could nudge
it in one direction or another. Radio antennas or telescopes could work too;
I'm just not aware of anything they see that meets some definition of "random"
except for maybe the surface of the sun, and the pattern of clouds on the
earth.

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atoav
How about clouds on another planet? Makes manipulation even harder and easier
to observe from earth itself

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dreamcompiler
Venusian clouds are easy to see with earth-based telescopes. Problems: There's
not a lot of variation -- it's solid cloud cover. And Venus has phases and we
never see it as a 100% disc (the Sun is in the way).

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epaga
Looks like the site is down due to an HN hug of death.

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Stratoscope
If you do get through, this is _much_ more interesting than the title makes it
sound. It's not just the images, but how you can get them directly from the
satellite with your own radio and antenna.

Is there a word for the converse of "clickbait"?

~~~
m-i-l
> Is there a word for the converse of "clickbait"?

The opposite of bait is repellent, so in that sense it would be
"clickrepellent". However, I don't think that gets across the point that it is
the inverse of "low value content with a misleadingly appealing headline",
i.e. it is high value content with a headline that doesn't adequately reflect
the value of the content. For this I was going to suggest "clickfish", as in
the valuable objective of bait (assuming a fishing metaphor). However, a quick
internet search reveals this is a widely used term already, e.g. for an
internet surfer who falls for (and reposts) clickbait, or the name of anti-
clickbait software. Then I thought of abstracting this a level with
"clicksupper", as in fish supper, a wholesome meal made from fish and served
with chips. Or how about "clicktreasure", thinking of buried treasure. But
then again, how about simply "anti-clickbait"?

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pennybacker
It's also possible to receive infrared images using the same technique, which
can be used in part to visualize the water vapor content of the atmosphere:

[https://www.goes-r.gov/education/ABI-bands-quick-
info.html](https://www.goes-r.gov/education/ABI-bands-quick-info.html)

Some parts of the imaging instrument (ABI) on GOES-17 responsible for keeping
it cool failed shortly after launch, causing the temperature to vary over the
course of the day:

[https://www.goes-r.gov/users/GOES-17-ABI-
Performance.html](https://www.goes-r.gov/users/GOES-17-ABI-Performance.html)

This doesn't affect the "visible" light images too much, but can cause all
sorts of problems for the infrared, which is used scientifically for various
cloud measurements, sea surface temperature, land surface temperature, etc.
It's still up in the air how useful we can make this data.

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lordnacho
I don't quite understand it from skimming the article. How are you able to
talk to the satellite on the protocol level? Is it continuously sending down
the bits in a known format? Do you have to authenticate with it?

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fauria
In this particular case, the author is using an SDR device to caputure data
emitted by the satellite, and then decode it using software (goestools). There
is no interaction with the satellite, it's just a device listening to a
broadacst emission.

As mentioned in the article, there are many interesting related projects:

* [https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weat...](https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weather-satellite-images/)

* [https://hackaday.com/2013/01/12/listening-in-on-weather-ball...](https://hackaday.com/2013/01/12/listening-in-on-weather-balloons-with-rtl-sdr/)

* [http://www.sdr-satellites.com/Weather](http://www.sdr-satellites.com/Weather)

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peatmoss
This is really cool! I keep meaning to try something like this just for the
thrill of receiving the data myself.

Though if receiving the data with your own antenna and SDR isn’t exciting, and
you just want to use the data, AWS hosts these (GOES-16 and 17) data on S3 for
everyone to use: [https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-
goes/](https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-goes/)

(Disclaimer: I work on the team that helps host these datasets)

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yason
I did wonder what full disk images of Earth might contain, considering various
block formats to contain various data collected from the globe. Then I read
the article.

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zeristor
I assume it’s a similar process to take the data from the European EUMETSAT
satellites?

Other geostationary satellites are available:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_satellite#Geostationar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_satellite#Geostationary)

You quite often see a bank of clocks for each time zone, it would be good to
have a geostationary image like this, from several different weather
satellites.

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JorgeGT
The Meteosats don't directly disseminate, there is a service, EUMETCast, which
broadcasts from commercial communications satellites, although you need a
decryption key:
[https://www.eumetsat.int/website/home/Data/DataDelivery/EUME...](https://www.eumetsat.int/website/home/Data/DataDelivery/EUMETCast/index.html)

The rationale behind this was that, in this way, you can receive the stream
with off-the-shelf satellite TV hardware and a PC, and without special radio
operator knowledge. This was of course well before the advent of cheap SDR
devices.

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kylek
Nice!

A bit unrelated but If you haven't seen it be sure to check out NASA's EPIC[0]
aboard their DSCOVR[1] satellite

[0] [https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/](https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/) [1]
[https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/dscovr-deep-space-
climat...](https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/dscovr-deep-space-climate-
observatory)

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ethank
Another way to pull them: [http://rammb-
slider.cira.colostate.edu/?sat=goes-17](http://rammb-
slider.cira.colostate.edu/?sat=goes-17)

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growlist
Nice. Makes me wonder what the hell else that's useful could be slurped from
up there.. Must be hundreds of feeds to listen to.

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trynewideas
Site's down. Hackaday has a writeup:
[https://hackaday.com/2019/05/03/__trashed-28/](https://hackaday.com/2019/05/03/__trashed-28/)

And Sorensen has been active on Reddit with this:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/bj61f9/24_hour_time...](https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/bj61f9/24_hour_timelapse_loop_from_goes17_using_airspy/)

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egman_ekki
Pretty cool. Anyone has any idea how the copyright situation looks like for
these images?

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JacobDotVI
Most US Government produced works are public domain.

[https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Organization/About/use.html](https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Organization/About/use.html)

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harryking
Very nice information ! geo stationary satellite 17 (GOES-17) would really
help in forcasting weather and taking full span images of earth

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Roritharr
Reading the headline I thought HN overnight settled on flat-earthers being
right and this link provides uncensored images for the first time.

