Slashdot Mirror
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."
...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.
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.
Not available for Thailand and parts of Soviet Russia, where as we all know, light receives them.
[alk]
"I don't get the joke on Thailand."
I read somewhere that the Earth exists in a state commonly referred to as 'round', so sometimes there are parts of the planet that light while others are dark. It's an interesting theory but I cannot claim to be an expert on the topic because I haven't looked out the window to observe this myself.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
We've slashdotted the whole earth!
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
*note: the original link has been slashdotted so I may not be fully aware of what this tech can do (magnification, etc).
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.
Suggestion: call Google.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
No, it means we were almost dead two hours ago.
The Internet is generally stupid
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/
What could possibly go wrong?
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
The suspense is killing me.
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
Here's a better link that explains "The above image is actually a composite of hundreds of pictures made by the orbiting DMSP satellites. "
Two words:
Wardrobe Malfunction.
"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry.'" -Gary Larson
Maybe that's why one night in Bangkok can make a hard man humble?
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
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.
That's so last week. Fiji's coup is all the rage now.
What are all these other places I see apart from America?
There is no joke on Thailand, except in the mind of the person who actually posted my story. The original word was Scandinavia, basically because it is now always (or almost) dark there and Envisat cannot take pictures, that was all. Now, if somebody can explain to me why my original story was modified, I would like to hear about it.
Customer: "Do I need a computer to use your software?"
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.
w00t