Earth from satellite.

November 16, 2001 7:15 AM

Earth from satellite. Something kind of neat for the astronomy geek is us all.
posted by goto11 (11 comments total)

Ah, yes, John Walker's Earth View. It's great fun. If you know your home town's local latitude and longitude, you can also see what the world looks like from directly overhead.
posted by alumshubby at 7:31 AM on November 16, 2001

Those pictures are fabulous.
On a similar note: NASA's "Earth at Night" composite. I'm sure its been posted before, but it always makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up
posted by muppetfiend at 7:33 AM on November 16, 2001

can't wait for real-time feeds. imagine getting live shots of the earth at different spectra over the internet. and if they could throw in zoom that'd be nice, too. now i'm thinking stellar cartography in star trek: generations.
posted by kliuless at 7:52 AM on November 16, 2001

what the world looks like from directly overhead

Ralph Wiggums: My head hurts. And I know when it's daytime in Portugal: It's my screensaver.
posted by y2karl at 8:01 AM on November 16, 2001

(Re: alumshubby's comment: you can find the longitude/latitude of your town here. Just enter it into the "From" field and leave the "to" field blank. I'm sure there are other tools for this elsewhere, but I figured people might want to use the info now.)
posted by arco at 8:04 AM on November 16, 2001

Ralph,

I used to have that as my screen saver too, but the false-color elevation imagery hurt my eyes after a while. Makes a nice "desktop" clock, though.
posted by alumshubby at 8:13 AM on November 16, 2001

If you like this sort of thing try xplanet. Very configurable, e.g. different projections, updates cloud maps. Produces lovely images.
posted by iain at 8:26 AM on November 16, 2001

er... I guess I'm really missing the point here. It's the same data set regardless of which "satelite" you choose. Most of the satelites in the list aren't even imaging satelites anyway. Walker's Earth is a pretty picture, but this is a pretty convoluted way to view it and the five other data sets you can turn on.

Why not a 3D plot of real time satelite positions, and just one nice rotatable globe with the "Living Earth" (or one of the other data sets) textured on it?
posted by badstone at 9:13 AM on November 16, 2001

i had heard (some time ago) about some kind of terraserver-like database of the night sky using info from the hubbel (sp?) scope, but i haven't heard anything since. anybody?
posted by clockwork at 10:31 AM on November 16, 2001

virtualsky.org is one such project. it literally uses terraserrver technology. they have consumed the entire DPOSS (Digitized Palomar Optical Sky Survey), but you can also turn on ROSAT (x-ray), NVSS (radio), Hubble Deep Field images, and the 100 micron Dust Map. they also have galaxy and star lookup via NED and Simbad, and they have a historical hand drafted map of the sky called Uranometria. they are supposed to start displaying imagery from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey eventually, as well, which would be really incredible.
posted by badstone at 11:38 AM on November 16, 2001

Now, I've never said this before, but...

badstone, I don't use the word "hero" very often, but you are the greatest hero in American history.
posted by y2karl at 3:07 PM on November 16, 2001