It’s a loose comparison, since both asphalt and the moon’s surface vary. Plus, there are tricky things like specular reflection and the opposition effect.
How can its color be compared to something on earth? Doesn't the (lack of) atmosphere have some effect?
You can hold a moon rock up against something on Earth. Or you can look at Earth and the moon from a distance with the same sensor, which is what Himawari-8 is doing.
The atmosphere does affect things: A huge plain of moon rocks on Earth’s surface would look bluer (hazier) than the moon would in the same picture from Himawari-8 (or an Apollo Hasselblad, etc.). And a moon rock in sunlight on Earth will look slightly yellower than one in the same light on the moon. But your eyes are constantly adapting to the surrounding illumination. Color perception is really complicated.
Casual readers may not get your reference – the idea for DSCOVR literally came to Al Gore in a dream. I still think this is hilarious.
One can indeed argue that DSCOVR has merit, and people including climate scientists do. (Though arguably it’s really too early to judge either way until there’s time for publications to come out of its data.) Earth’s radiation budget is surprisingly underdetermined, considering its importance.
But it’s certainly a fair criticism of DSCOVR as launched that it’s not state-of-the-art. That’s because it was delayed for reasons of politics, only loosely disguised as reasons of science.
The only places I’d push back on your remarks are:
1. The “Uh no”, which is unsubstantiated (perhaps just facetious, but I’m sensitive because I supported my point relatively laboriously, with the links); and
2. the idea that the NYT should refrain from pointing out political interference in science funding.
Which is why I linked directly to a NY Times peace that gives a fairly balanced discussion of the same.
And it is not fair to claim that it was, "only loosely disguised as reasons of science." The reasons given, in both the Inspector General's report and in the article that I linked to are political reasons of _budget_.
It is not unsubstantiated as I substantiate it via link. I'm also a person that opposed the launch. As others point out, it wasn't _fabulously_ expensive in comparative scale, but in a very stretched NASA budget I would prefer all the pennies thrown at a mars exploration, a permanent moon base, a better space station, or a new shuttle program over a really cool camcorder inspired by a VP's (very literal) dream. That isn't science so much as something bordering on dictatorial whim.
Nor, _anywhere_ do I claim the NYT should somehow not report on science funding. I link directly to it to refute _your_ comments. The NYT article does not support your claim, instead it gives a much more reasonable account of the funding issue. It mentions the dream, the funding, and doesn't resort to slurs.
I'd love to have something like this as an animated desktop wallpaper - but it should be moving much slower. Are you aware of a movie file that I could use for this?
I wrote a script that downloads the live (well, every 10 minutes, with 30 minutes delay) tiles from the himawari-8 website and update my background with it. Gnome is nice enough that it refreshes the background when the configured image changes.
Xplanet can render to the background and keep an updated view of earth. At some point I obsessed over having current cloud cover images overlaid and that looked really nice. It can even render sun reflections.
Thanks! This was increadable to watch over and over again. I'm so used to highly compressed video, that the detail in this was staggering.
Is there a good public reasonably live feed of this data? I found the 800x800 8 bit pngs, and I found information on the restricted access full sized 103 gigabyte per day feed.
How awesome would it be if we had that kind if quality available from all "sides"... (Ok, yes, one could mostly build displays of blue spheres. But fancy ones ;))
Europe’s weather authorities are extremely stingy with their nearest equivalent data – their attitude is that the observations are for science or for money, not for silly websites.
Feel free to provide an email address for us to complain.
There's another satellite, DCSOVR, that takes photos of the daylight side of the earth several times a day. It's not as up-to-date as this footage, but it's always fully lit. http://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/
In addition to the link posted by celoyd, you can get access to the full data stream you mentioned by filling out this application form[0].
There are also some heavily processed images from that data available from NOAA[1] - the "Geocolor Full Disk" is the best, it's half-resolution (5500x5500). The green filter on Himawari's camera doesn't correctly capture the green color of vegetation, which is why OP's video looks browner than you might expect. So this product attempts to correct for that by creating an artificial green channel made of a combination of other channels[2]. It also attempts to correct for Rayleigh scattering[3], so this is basically what the Earth would look like if the atmosphere suddenly disappeared (except for the clouds :P). The night portions of these images are a different kind of false color composite: the clouds come from two infrared channels, white are high ice clouds and red are low wet clouds; the city lights are (sadly) just a static overlay from existing data.
And (shameless plug) I've been playing with applying motion interpolation algorithms to these NOAA images to create smooth, high resolution video that can be played much slower. The Farneback optical flow algorithm[4][5] seems to work very well. (Lots of) videos available on my Youtube channel[6], code/details available here[7][8], blog post coming soon :)
Wow. Great stuff! Is there a good way to use one a video at a very low framerate (perhaps 0.1-1 fps) with low resource requirements as animated wallpaper on Ubuntu/Linux?
Cool demo. On my machine though (high-dpi monitor, win10, firefox) the globe is enormous and way too big for the browser viewport. If I zoom out enough with ctrl-minus it is about the right size, so I think you're sizing the page elements incorrectly in some sort of dpi-unaware fashion. Can probably work around this with devicePixelRatio.
FWIW I don't think ‘enormity’ means what you think it does!
‘Enormity’ refers to severe moral transgression, like you could say, “It wasn't until after the war had ended that the German people became aware of the enormity of Hitler's concentration camps…” That's closer to what the word means.
I appreciate that choice, but maybe add a zoom out button to notify people that you can in fact zoom out, because I didn't even realize I could see the whole earth (Also, this made the 'what is that bright spot moving east to west' question very confusing).
Discovery at Udvar-Hazy is why I started this project. I saw the serial numbers on the tiles – almost close enough to touch on tiptoe – and remembered reading about some kind of database. I imagined a visualization with a line for every tile over time, and decided to find the records to make the viz.
That was two years ago. I’ve asked a lot of people since then, but after making a web site for the project (on @doingitwrong’s advice), this week is by far the most attention it’s gotten. I’m hoping this is what finally gets word to someone who knows something.
> The environmentalist threw a fit about this "glue" and it was replaced with a glue that all the engineers said was not as safe, in regards to the tiles staying attached...
Reading a false story is dangerous -- the mind tends to remember the story, and forget the "It's a myth" part over time.
This is also why "Myth vs Facts" or sarcastic "How to do X Very Wrong" articles are bad style -- they undermine the goal. Better to write using language that affirms the truth, not multiple negations.
> the mind tends to remember the story, and forget the "It's a myth" part over time.
I find the opposite to be true. Once I've identified something I thought to be once true was in fact misleading/wrong/a myth, it seems to be forever stamped as a falsehood in my brain. Likewise when I know going into it reading it that it is a myth/false.
I'm seeing a flash of lines, a flash of text, and then it all disappears. Tried in chromium, google chrome, and firefox, similar behaviour on all three.
edit: just to confirm, i did clear all caches to pull in any new style etc
I wrote that Mapbox post, and helped with some of the processing that happens to get this data on AWS. Yep, you get multispectral resolution of 30 m, and with pansharpening (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pansharpened_image, etc.) you can get visually acceptable quality at 15 m in RGB.
Landsat is basically intended for science about seasonal/annual/decade-scale changes in Earth’s land surface. When you see an estimate of how a city’s built-up area has grown since 1980, or how the Everglades are changing, it probably has Landsat as one source. This explains a lot of design decisions that might seem weird to a layperson who wants to use it for everyday RGB imagery. Most use of Landsat imagery is basically off-label. It’s just very good data in terms of accuracy, precision, and general ease of use. And if I say so myself, it looks real pretty: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/landsat-live-live/
In the images in the blog post and the live map? Those aren’t pansharpened at all. If we do add pansharpening in a later version, it’ll likely be naïve, without spatially aware modeling of the multispectral data. (Specifically, it’ll probably be a cleaned-up, rasterio-based, null-aware, parallelized descendant of this sketch of the Brovey transform in numpy: https://gist.github.com/celoyd/2e7beed82951d22b9b90 .)
From what I’ve seen – and I haven’t tested it carefully yet, so I could be wrong – the more elaborate methods are severe overkill on Landsat 8. It has only 4 pan px per multi px (where some commercial data has 9 or 16), and the pan band is almost exactly R+G+B (without NIR). So my gut and some simple experiments suggest that doing PCA-or-whatever is overthinking it.
