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Seeing the Earth Almost Live

Posted by samzenpus on from the smile-for-the-satellite dept.

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."

4 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Google Maps is off-topic by mrchaotica · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  2. Programmer senses tingling by Ironsides · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  3. Quality by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 2, Insightful
    To avoid filling up their disks too quickly, only the bmp of the last 30 days are available but jpg are kept.

    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."
  4. Re:Triana Satalite by hey! · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's a shame. Every time I see Al Gore's name come up, I flinch, waiting for the inevitable "joke" to rear it's brain-dead head.

    Don't people ever tire of acting like sheep?

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