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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."
...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)
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...
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)
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?
Spatial resolution is approximately 300m. 15 spectral bands. Primary use is going to be for things like climate change, land use, etc. Fun to play with if you know what you are doing with it. I've been working in my spare time on code in IDL/ENVI to do imagebasing of aerial imagery so looks like I have a new source of lots of data for testing/playing!
The suspense is killing me.
Maybe that's why one night in Bangkok can make a hard man humble?
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
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?"