
Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of earths surface - seesawtron
https://zoom.earth/
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neave
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/](https://zoom.earth/storms/)

~~~
jrichardshaw
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/](https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/sentinel-playground/)) to help plan
backcountry trips around here, as it's great for seeing the local snow
conditions.

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

~~~
jrichardshaw
Oh, that's interesting. ESA says they distribute the Sentinel data free of
charge as far as I can tell. So I guess the issue is that you'd need to
download and host the data yourself, rather than just do an API call to
someone else's archive?

Anyway, it's a cool website, nice work!

~~~
zetalemur
Yeah and hosting it by yourself is slightly non-trivial as the storage
requirements are in the PB range.

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supernova87a
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...

~~~
qeternity
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
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.

~~~
neave
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.

~~~
jerkstate
Why not just say how old each image is, like with a color overlay? “Zoom past
this level and you will be looking at 400 days ago” etc

~~~
neave
It does - imagery is dated to the nearest month from level ~12 and higher.
(See top left on desktop, bottom on mobile)

~~~
raphman
From which year are the cloudless images shown when deselecting the live/daily
layers? There seems to be one per month but all from the same year, right?

It's interesting to see how winter is taking hold of the planet - but a little
bit disappointing that I cannot compare snowy areas between different years.

~~~
neave
So live/daily is for zoom levels 0-9, and the archive goes back 20 years to
2000. Zoom in, and older imagery dates will vary based on the location.

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crazygringo
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
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](https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk.php?sat=G16)

~~~
crazygringo
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?

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jmgao
> constant camera exposure

Sure, just take an image and color the night part completely black. Street
lighting is around 10 lux -- sunlight is _100,000_ lux.

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basicplus2
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..

~~~
oriettaxx
funny, but what is a "subdial" ?

~~~
basicplus2
Sundial

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greggman3
This only goes by years not in 10 min increments but it animates

[https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse](https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse)

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taylorlapeyre
Another great site for viewing earth weather patterns:
[https://earth.nullschool.net](https://earth.nullschool.net)

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hnarn
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.

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

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maskedinvader
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.

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

~~~
soylentcola
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.

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seesawtron
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](https://zoom.earth/storms/douglas-2020/#layers=labels)

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

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

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Jemm
Sailor here. Thank you.

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mnw21cam
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.

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njsubedi
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.

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supernihil
What about free amazon 52cm sqaure resolution satelite images?

[https://registry.opendata.aws/spacenet/](https://registry.opendata.aws/spacenet/)

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kranner
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.

~~~
neave
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.

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

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

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culopatin
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

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

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

~~~
neave
Not quite, but you can see the contrails. Example:
[https://zoom.earth/#view=40.174,-136.065,7z/date=2020-07-20,...](https://zoom.earth/#view=40.174,-136.065,7z/date=2020-07-20,23:00)
Change the date to see them being created.

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

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aussieguy1234
Tried from Australia, the imagery of my neighbourhood is from 2018

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

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

~~~
neave
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.

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WarOnPrivacy
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.

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lmilcin
Thumbs down.

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

~~~
neave
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.

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arkanciscan
Planet does it better
[https://www.planet.com/gallery/](https://www.planet.com/gallery/)

~~~
geuis
There’s a Planet Explorer,
[https://www.planet.com/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.

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

