I looked at a 2018 picture of my house and it is 100 percent not from 2018. Cars and patio furniture from past owner 4 years ago
Look at the bottom attribution... zoom in enough and it’ll switch to a big data provider with stale maps.
Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of earths surface
41–50 of 85 posts
Re: Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of earths surface
#42First of all, this is super super super cool.
But also... I'm super confused about the nighttime imagery.
Looking at daytime imagery from this afternoon over the US, everything looks legit -- it looks "real", shadows from clouds get longer as the sun gets lower in the sky, shadows on mountain ranges change, etc.
But as soon as it transitions to night, all realism goes out the window. Urban areas are absurdly bright, clouds are still blindingly white on top, the pattern of lights don't change even a tiny bit throughout the night... it's like it's no longer using photos but combining a static nighttime image with radar-detected clouds drawn on top. The gradient between daytime and nighttime also seems highly artificial.
Do other people agree that the nighttime imagery is totally simulated, not photographs at all? I'd just kind of like to see a version that showed real nighttime imagery, even if it was mostly super-dark (but they could HDR it which would be fine too).
Re: Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of earths surface
#43First of all, this is super super super cool. But also... I'm super confused about the nighttime imagery. Looking at daytime imagery from this afternoon over the US, everything looks legit -- it looks "real", shadows from clouds get longer as the sun gets lower in the sky, shadows on mountain ranges change, etc. But as soon as it transitions to night, all realism goes out the window. Urban areas are absurdly bright,…
This is using GOES imagery for "live" North America which uses multispectral IR for night [1] but True Color for day. Once you pass a certain zoom level, it switches to historical imagery from Microsoft.
Side note, you can receive GOES images straight from the satellite yourself with a $30 SDR, a $30 LNA, and an antenna made from scrap (or ~$100 if you're not handy).
[1] https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk.php?sat=G16
Re: Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of earths surface
#44First of all, this is super super super cool. But also... I'm super confused about the nighttime imagery. Looking at daytime imagery from this afternoon over the US, everything looks legit -- it looks "real", shadows from clouds get longer as the sun gets lower in the sky, shadows on mountain ranges change, etc. But as soon as it transitions to night, all realism goes out the window. Urban areas are absurdly bright,…
This is using GOES imagery for "live" North America which uses multispectral IR for night [1] but True Color for day. Once you pass a certain zoom level, it switches to historical imagery from Microsoft. Side note, you can receive GOES images straight from the satellite yourself with a $30 SDR, a $30 LNA, and an antenna made from scrap (or ~$100 if you're not handy). [1] https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk…
Ah ha that explains it perfectly, thanks.
I've always been curious what a real day+night satellite image looks like. The simulated ones always show urban areas as absurdly bright.
Does anyone have links to satellite imagery that shows the actual full real transition from daytime to nighttime, at a constant camera exposure so without exaggeration?
Re: Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of earths surface
#45First of all, this is super super super cool. But also... I'm super confused about the nighttime imagery. Looking at daytime imagery from this afternoon over the US, everything looks legit -- it looks "real", shadows from clouds get longer as the sun gets lower in the sky, shadows on mountain ranges change, etc. But as soon as it transitions to night, all realism goes out the window. Urban areas are absurdly bright,…
> I'd just kind of like to see a version that showed real nighttime imagery, even if it was mostly super-dark (but they could HDR it which would be fine too).
It wouldn’t just be super-dark; it would be black. The GOES visible light sensors do not produce any useful data after dark. (See it yourself: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk_band.php?sat=... ... this is the blue channel.)
The image that’s being used here (for the US imagery) is what CIRA calls GeoColor: true-color imagery during the day (with simulated green channel; the GOES-R satellites don’t have a green channel), and multispectral IR composited on top of a static city lights image at night.
Re: Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of earths surface
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is using GOES imagery for "live" North America which uses multispectral IR for night [1] but True Color for day. Once you pass a certain zoom level, it switches to historical imagery from Microsoft. Side note, you can receive GOES images straight from the satellite yourself with a $30 SDR, a $30 LNA, and an antenna made from scrap (or ~$100 if you're not handy). [1] https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk…
Ah ha that explains it perfectly, thanks. I've always been curious what a real day+night satellite image looks like. The simulated ones always show urban areas as absurdly bright. Does anyone have links to satellite imagery that shows the actual full real transition from daytime to nighttime, at a constant camera exposure so without exaggeration?
> constant camera exposure
Sure, just take an image and color the night part completely black. Street lighting is around 10 lux -- sunlight is 100,000 lux.
Re: Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of earths surface
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is using GOES imagery for "live" North America which uses multispectral IR for night [1] but True Color for day. Once you pass a certain zoom level, it switches to historical imagery from Microsoft. Side note, you can receive GOES images straight from the satellite yourself with a $30 SDR, a $30 LNA, and an antenna made from scrap (or ~$100 if you're not handy). [1] https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk…
Ah ha that explains it perfectly, thanks. I've always been curious what a real day+night satellite image looks like. The simulated ones always show urban areas as absurdly bright. Does anyone have links to satellite imagery that shows the actual full real transition from daytime to nighttime, at a constant camera exposure so without exaggeration?
This isn't constant exposure throughout but at some points you can see the transition pretty clearly such as 21:32, some great shots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM2wtte1JRE
Re: Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of earths surface
#48Tried from Australia, the imagery of my neighbourhood is from 2018
Re: Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of earths surface
#49Tried from Australia, the imagery of my neighbourhood is from 2018
Past a certain zoom level it displays historical imagery. Zoom out to get recent photos.
Re: Zoom Earth: Website lets you look at live satellite photos of earths surface
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, that's fair. But what / who then are they trying to sell the idea of with the phrase "live"? Is any average person really interested in a "live" view of the whole Earth, such that it would be meaningfully different or changed compared to the static blue marble photo we're all familiar with? I think we all know what we're interested in when we think of "live"... things at the <<1km level.
I'm the developer of Zoom Earth. "Live" is shorthand for "near real-time". But, you're right. Most visitors simply want to see their house from space. Which is understandable, but also kinda depressing. They could look at _anywhere in the world in near realtime_, but they wanna see what their roof or garden looks like. Meteorologists love it though.
I guess it's pretty normal to check your own place because you know it well enough to rate the quality of the imagery. In this case, whatever you're using offers better and more recent resolution than Google Earth at greater speed so it's my New Favorite Thing.
Do you have a WMS interface?