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."

James Kim?

[blankoboy]

Where was this technology when it would have proved so useful? Couldn't this be used to find missing people?

*note: the original link has been slashdotted so I may not be fully aware of what this tech can do (magnification, etc).

Make an awesome desktop widget

[mliu]

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.

Re:Night lights

[ProfessionalCookie]

Here's a better link [nasa.gov] that explains "The above image is actually a composite of hundreds of pictures made by the orbiting DMSP satellites. "

Huge demand for near-realtime satellite imagery

[heroine]

While everyone scrambles to make portable mp3 players and game stations and search engines, this huge demand for near-realtime satellite imagery is going unfilled. In countries with crazy inflation and concentrated job growth, it's common to buy land far far away from the jobs instead of saving cash.

Satellite imagery could allow those people to see the current condition of their assets and the surrounding area at any time. It would allow them to buy more assets without having to travel there. People who are now watching their cash investments disappear in the flood of inflation would have a chance to survive.

The UK server doesn't have enough bandwidth to do it but maybe if someone looked away from their Macworld program for a second they could offer a live version of Google maps.

Not much better than a weather satellite

[heroine]

After getting in on Windows Flash 9 and between European server crashes, it appears this service is just a very hyped weather satellite viewer. It's even lower resolution than the weather satellite images you can download every 30 minutes. Score another point for extremely hyped ESA innovations that do absolutely nothing.