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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."

2 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. James Kim? by blankoboy · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Where was this technology when it would have proved so useful? Couldn't this be used to find missing people?

    *note: the original link has been slashdotted so I may not be fully aware of what this tech can do (magnification, etc).

  2. Make an awesome desktop widget by mliu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.