Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes • Hacker News Board

Re: Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes

#41

Post by ShardPhoenix » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 7:09 AM UTC

rktjmp wrote: post #40

Animats wrote: post #6

Nice. Japan needs better weather data; too many hurricanes and too much coastal development. From geostationary orbit, the resolution has to be low, but it's always on. The US has two geostationary weather satellites, which are usually parked roughly over Panama and Hawaii. Neither has good coverage of Japan. Korea's COMS satellite does, though. China has several, including one that's usually pointed roughly at Taiwa…

Why does geostationary orbit infer low resolution? Or do you mean "from orbit" in general?

Geostationary satellites orbit much further away (~35,786 km) from Earth than non-stationary satellites (~2000 km).

Re: Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes

#42

Post by eseymour » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 8:26 AM UTC

Are there any other sources with constant up to date imagery like this? This looks great and would like to see other current satellite images, and maybe use them for visualizations or some projects.

Re: Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes

#43

Post by chippy » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 9:26 AM UTC

state wrote: post #7

I have always hoped that someday Google Earth would just be live.

Most of the high resolution "I can see my car from here" images are from aeroplanes.

Re: Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes

#44

Post by tomkwok » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 9:44 AM UTC

tomkwok wrote: post #35

Here is a 11000x11000 = 121 million pixel 'full disk' image [1] (lower resolution at [2]) captured at 0340 UTC on 7 July 2015 by the Himawari-8 satellite, which I found on a blog post [3]. Real-time images from the weather satellite can be found here [4]. [1]: http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015... Mirror of [1]: http://d-h.st/cgHl Warning: the JPEG file[1] is ~ 70MB in size. [2]: http://cims…

I'm scraping the site and generating lots of 11000x11000-resolution images in PNG format, available for you to download here [0].

Refer to filenames for date and time when the photos are taken. The file size of the images (taken at around 0300 UTC each day) is up to ~ 150MB.

[0]: https://mega.nz/#F!r4JTxYJT!NAzBOkuBt2tuyYdnz8hXQg

Re: Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes

#45

Post by icebraining » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 10:19 AM UTC

slagfart wrote: post #22

Syrup-tan wrote: post #19

I wrote a simple shell script[0] to scrape and output the latest image. It uses the tiles from their online satellite map[1], and can output images in increments of 1x1, 2x2, 4x4, 16x16 tiles (each tile being 550px by 550px). Here is an example with 2x2 [2] If you have any suggestions or bugfixes, feel free to fork or comment. EDIT: Also works for a single tile[3], also clarity. [0] https://gist.github.com/Syrup-tan/…

Is anyone busily tapping away at a Windows port of this? I'm enthusiastic, but it would take me all day/week

You could probably run it in a cygwin shell (after installing curl and ImageMagick).

Re: Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes

#46

Post by bovermyer » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 12:35 PM UTC

sosuke wrote: post #4

The Earth is so beautiful. I saw GOES-R http://www.goes-r.gov/ and the pronunciation I heard in my head made me think of Ghostbusters.

I am convinced that that was intentional, though I have no proof to back that up.

Re: Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes

#47

Post by callesgg » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 1:55 PM UTC

blackguardx wrote: post #36

callesgg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the resolution difference is quite big. Planet labs satellites captures with something like 1mx1m resolution. This satellite has a resolution of about 500mx500m

I think it is actually 5m. 1m gets pretty close to spy satellite territory. The planet labs lens only has a focal length of <30cm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Labs

Yeah 3-5 meters apparently.

And i would assume spy satellites can do much better than 1m.

According to wikipedia spy satellites has a estimated resolution of about 10 cm.

Re: Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes

#48

Post by Retra » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

chriscampbell wrote: post #27

Is it common to lock a satellite into a stationary orbit?

Yep! Unless you want access to the poles or multiple sides of the planet for some reason.

Re: Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes

#49

Post by blackguardx » Sat, Jul 11, 2015, 11:15 PM UTC

callesgg wrote: post #47

blackguardx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is actually 5m. 1m gets pretty close to spy satellite territory. The planet labs lens only has a focal length of <30cm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Labs Yeah 3-5 meters apparently. And i would assume spy satellites can do much better than 1m. According to wikipedia spy satellites has a estimated resolution of about 10 cm.

Modern Spy Satellites certainly do. However, there are rules that govern what a non-governmental entity can put into space.

Re: Japan’s New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every Ten Minutes

#50

Post by bargl » Mon, Jul 13, 2015, 2:48 PM UTC

branchan wrote: post #25

bargl wrote: post #3

So my first thought was (will this replace the doves by space labs). Which was an earlier story on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158295 It won't because these are geostationary satellites (if I read the post correctly). So you'd need at least 3 of these to get a good image and that's not even considering some of the bigger issues with this. I also don't think the resolution is on par. But the images will…

Uhhh, this spacecraft is for a totally different application. Planet Labs doves are in LEO for low earth observation. This Japanese one is a weather satellite to monitor the area around Japan.

Yup that's what I was getting at, my first thought was that they'd be competing then I looked at the use cases and I wanted to point out that they were different, but I might have been the only one who thought that in the first place :-)