Made by the father of a friend with decades experience in satellite imagery. It works recombinining public data feeds from several satellites to create close to real time RGB views of the planet.
Most free data being from old satellites watching earth only a wavelength, the magic behind those breathtaking views is to recombine the data to create RGB impressions and correcting for the different spacial movements and orientation of satellites.
Is there a reasonably priced service (for individual budgets and not corporation budgets) that would allow you to rent a satellite in order to for example count the number of Teslas that are out on the road in a given city in the United States?
That might be too low of a resolution for RGB, I have a feeling that few cars would share the same spectral signature in the commonly measured bands. A lot of papers have been written on vehicle identification using SAR - so that would probably be the way to go.
not possible -- the "complete coverage" companies have to deal with clouds and other atmospheric elements. Good math helps a lot with creating landuse coverages, but you can never increase the detail as you are asking
You could use SAR to observe independent of lighting and climate. I’m not sure how good the coverage is right now but it’s improving (see Iceye and Capella). Resolution for car ID though… I’m not sure it’s up to that
Planet has some services that use machine learning to count ships and detect roads. I believe you might be able to run your own models on the data, but detecting teslas vs other cars would be difficult at current resolutions. Unfortunately not reasonably priced for individuals
Anyone know of "solar system simulation" software that allows one to explore all celestial bodies, probes, and satellites currently (and historically) in the solar system -- like a 3D program? I know NASA has Eyes but that's not so comprehensive (it doesn't have the JWST, for example)
Stellarium's cool too, but it's more focused on what you see if you look up at the sky. Celestia's more of a broad "fly around the known universe"-type of simulator.
I‘m fascinated by "current" satellite images. The most enjoyable option I‘ve found is the FreshSat layers available in the Gaia GPS app. Being able to hold it in your hand while out and about and "look over walls", so to speak, is really fun.
They combine the free Sentinel and Landsat images, I think, and a few web services do that too, but none of them seem to work as well.
Oh that's unfortunate. I just checked and FreshSat is listed as a "Premium" layer in the app. It's a good piece of software but not worth it just for what is essentially free data.
Most free data being from old satellites watching earth only a wavelength, the magic behind those breathtaking views is to recombine the data to create RGB impressions and correcting for the different spacial movements and orientation of satellites.
Some highlights in the gallery such as the California and Austrialian fires, as seen from space https://earth2day.com/TheWall/Gallery/gallery.html