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Seeing the Earth Almost Live
arobic writes "European Space Agency (ESA) is putting recent pictures of the Earth (taken 2 hours before) online using Envisat. To avoid filling up their disks too quickly, only the bmp of the last 30 days are available but jpg are kept. Also, only region receiving light can be seen, which explains why no recent pictures of Thailand are available."
I don't get the joke on Thailand.
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
...see naked people ?
(If not, this thing is not useful at all).
-- Rastignac was here.
There's no light in Thailand? Have they fallen afoul of the sun or something?
'No light for you! Come back one summer solstice!'
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Also, only region receiving light can be seen, which explains why no recent pictures of Thailand are available.
Did I miss something? Did some devious Thai overlord deploy a sun-blocking device recently?
This guy's the limit!
As usual, we keep aspiring countries in the dark to have access to cheap labour.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To avoid filling up their disks too quickly, only the bmp of the last 30 days are available
But what are they doing to avoid filling up their server bandwidth? :-p
it's full of........., erm, oh, that doesn't work
So the satellite receive nothing from them=>Thailand cannot be seen. Or maybe this is a sick joke I do not get at all.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I tried to go see the tornado damage in London, but apparently the resolution is extremely low - at the multinational zoom level, if you will.
stalkers will be soo happy when they see this
http://maps.google.com/ is more intuitive than the ESA MIRAVI and if you would like a more powerful tool check out http://earth.google.com/.
Not available for Thailand and parts of Soviet Russia, where as we all know, light receives them.
[alk]
We've slashdotted the whole earth!
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
The world is a cam whore.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
*note: the original link has been slashdotted so I may not be fully aware of what this tech can do (magnification, etc).
I can't get to the website.. does that mean we are almost dead now?
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/200634 1/
The point of this thing is that the pictures are "almost live." The imagery in Google Maps tends to be several years old. It's not the same thing at all.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Can't quite get through to the site already, but just an idea.
In terms of awesome eye candy this would make just above the coolest desktop widget (for MacOS, Vista, or Yahoo! Widget Engine or whatever). A view of the Earth from space that reflects continuous conditions as they're seen.
You could see it snow outside your window and then 2 hours later you see that your region is now covered in a sheet of white on the map. During the Persian Gulf War I wonder if this had been around if you would have been able to see all the smoke burning oil fields.
Not sure if such a thing would be possible due to technical limitations, but if so I would be the first to run it on my desktop.
Since when is 2 hours delay called "live"?
Suggestion: call Google.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Al Gore had an idea to orbit a satellite that provides a continual view of the Earth.
Shame, I would have like to have seen that publicized and championed by the media. A little cultural enlightenment might have gone a long way.
NASA has been doing this for a long time now.
Sure RapidFire doesnt have the flashy web interface (actually i dont like the MIRAVI web site), but all the photos are there and up to date.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/
I think I just spotted WMD in Iraq and North Korea. Quickly, someone get me through to Bush.
OMG...I almost missed that! PONIESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSs
What could possibly go wrong?
You know that pretty world light pollution picture. That's enhanced. It's not what the typical human eye sees at night time. The lights are much more dim from space. There's not too much to see with the same cameras that take day pictures.
Riiiiight... Has anyone ever seen Thailand and Envisat together? Didn't think so! One minute Thailand is right next to you, then you turn around and there's Envisat, but where did Thailand go???
I think any decent person can see what I'm getting at here.
Sure it's dark right now, but boy was it bright earlier on
I kind of like the older Google satellite pictures better. I got laid off a couple of years ago, but the satellite picture of my bus stop still shows my car parked there so I can still feel like I have a job.
I sense the idea for a project to automatically take these images and update a map of the earth in real time.
And why the hell aren't they using PNG instead of BMP?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Mr Burns!
(Probably happened around the time as that episode with the power plant moved to India)
I'd pay a few bucks a month (maybe more than a few) for a HD feed of the planet in near-realtime.
Any rich geeks want to put up a spy sat? I'm sure I'm not alone.
..don't panic
"There is no dark side of Thailand. As a matter of fact, it's all dark."
"I like to skate on the other side of the ice"
The suspense is killing me.
When there's only two choices, Almost live still means dead.
You can only see old people.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
My whole house could disappear as a JPEG compression artifact.
How about TIFF with LZW compression as a compromise?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Oddly enough, yes.
Though I do have fond memories of Billy Quan, The Lame List (or, "What's Weak This Week"), and the super-hero SPEED-WALKER! Plus you can see Bill Nye in his pre-Science-Guy days.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Yes. The most destructive force in the universe.
Nothing can escape it, not even light.
Now I'll be able to see pictures of the earth and it will be almost like I'm there!
While everyone scrambles to make portable mp3 players and game stations and search engines, this huge demand for near-realtime satellite imagery is going unfilled. In countries with crazy inflation and concentrated job growth, it's common to buy land far far away from the jobs instead of saving cash.
Satellite imagery could allow those people to see the current condition of their assets and the surrounding area at any time. It would allow them to buy more assets without having to travel there. People who are now watching their cash investments disappear in the flood of inflation would have a chance to survive.
The UK server doesn't have enough bandwidth to do it but maybe if someone looked away from their Macworld program for a second they could offer a live version of Google maps.
Is it the High Fivin' White Guys?
Was that one named for ESA being envious of another space organization? Or others successes in launching Mars vehicles?
:-)
Hmm... I wonder which that could be.
(note: I'm European too; this isn't a cocky American.. just found the name funny)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
What are all these other places I see apart from America?
Un, no. Its 'state' is more or less 'spherical'.
I want to surf for light polluting cities. Do any of these satellite map sites give you the nighttime images?
After getting in on Windows Flash 9 and between European server crashes, it appears this service is just a very hyped weather satellite viewer. It's even lower resolution than the weather satellite images you can download every 30 minutes. Score another point for extremely hyped ESA innovations that do absolutely nothing.
Also, only regions receiving light can be seen, which explains why no recent pictures of Thailand are available
Oh thank God. I thought Thailand had finally had enough and just left.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
5 pixels per mile, at least effectively
(I don't know if they magnify that to get something big and blurry)
A typical town will be the size of a small menu icon, or 3 to 4 characters in the default xterm font.
That sig is brilliant: painfully funny. Sorry to go OT.
$META_SIG_JOKE
As usual. When I'm trying to be funny, I'm modded troll. When I try to be insightful, it's considered funny.
Maybe I should just troll the shi.. out of everyone, I'm quite sure I get modded insightful in the blink of an eye.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.