How to Pull Images from Satellites in Orbit

How to get free satellite images at home using a DIY satellite dish, some hardware and software.

Thanks to the many satellites we've put into orbit over the years, there is an enormous amount of data available to us in realtime these days. And hidden in all that data are some really amazing and interesting things to see. From high resolution time lapses of the sun, to realtime images of the entire planet in a dozen wavelengths. And thanks to the immense archive of data, we can see how the world has changed over time more clearly than ever.

Full Disk Images and Movies of the Himawari Weather Satellites

This page provides a part of Himawari 8 data since July 7, 2015, and Himawari 9, which is waiting for backup. Geostationary Meteorological Satellites: Himawari, GOES, GMS and MTSAT and Satellite Images (Photographs) provides the basic information, and Himawari-8 Watching (in Japanese) provides other latest information.

See also: SLIDER: Satellite Loop Interactive Data Explorer in Realtime | Satellite Data Services Inventory

BepiColombo Earth Flyby in Images

BepiColombo, the joint European-Japanese mission, performed an Earth flyby on 10 April 2020 to adjust its trajectory en route to its destination, Mercury. The spacecraft, equipped with three 'selfie' cameras, captured a series of stunning images of the planet, and was also photographed by astronomers, including amateurs, on Earth.

Eyes on the Earth

“Eyes on the Earth” displays the location of all of NASA's operating Earth-observing missions in real time and lets you compare them in size to a scientist or a school bus. Get a sneak peek at upcoming missions and learn how NASA is planning to study our Earth in the future.

Trace the movement of water around the globe using the gravity map from NASA's GRACE satellites. Spot volcanic eruptions and forest fires using the carbon monoxide vital sign. Check out the hottest and coldest locations on Earth with the global surface temperature map.

Heavens Above, Satellite Tracking

Heavens-Above is a non-profit website developed and maintained by Chris Peat as Heavens-Above GmbH.

The web site is dedicated to helping people observe and track satellites orbiting the Earth without the need for optical equipment such as binoculars or telescopes. It provides detailed star charts showing the trajectory of the satellites against the background of the stars as seen during a pass. The website also offers information on currently visible comets, asteroids, planet details, and other miscellaneous information.

SLIDER: Satellite Loop Interactive Data Explorer in Realtime

The recent launches of the GOES-16 and Himawari-8 satellites bring with them immense data sets of satellite imagery, and new visualization tools are needed to facilitate their exploration. To that end, the Satellite Loop Interactive Data Explorer in Realtime (SLIDER) web application was recently developed. SLIDER provides full-resolution, standard and value-added imagery products from GOES-16 and Himawari-8 to both the scientific community and the general public.

See also: Satellite Data Services Inventory | Full Disk Images and Movies of the Himawari Weather Satellites

Satellite Data Services Inventory

The Satellite Data Services (SDS) group, formerly known as the Data Center, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC), is responsible for the access, maintenance, and distribution of realtime and archive weather satellite data. The SDS currently archives research-quality data from many different geostationary satellites around the world.

The SDS Inventory provides access to over a petabyte of data from one of the world's largest archives of geostationary weather satellite data. This inventory contains a diverse set of data, spanning back to the 1970s. It contains data from all GOES and numerous international satellites.

See also SLIDER: Satellite Loop Interactive Data Explorer in Realtime | Full Disk Images and Movies of the Himawari Weather Satellites

Space Based ADS-B Coverage

Flight tracking systems like FlightAware and FlightRadar24 use the ADS-B system of aircrafts to track their locations. This system requires clear line of sight, so the trackers loose the signals of airplanes after they vanish behind the curvature horizon. This is why some aircrafts vanish from the screen of the flight trackers.

Space based ADS-B will close the gap and and use satellites to relay the positions sent by the ADS-B transmitters of aircrafts to the ground stations.

See also: FlightRadar24 Satellite based aircraft tracking now available to all users

FlightRadar24 Satellite based aircraft tracking now available to all users

As the first flight tracking service to integrate satellite-based ADS-B into a public platform in 2016, we’re proud to announce we’re also the first to make space-based ADS-B data available to all users. All our users will see most flights tracked via satellite and we also offer additional specialized space-based tracking data for our professional customers.

Radarbox gives access to older flights for non-registered users.

See also: Space Based ADS-B Coverage

Measuring Gravity With GRACE

GRACE, short for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, is a NASA mission consisting of twin satellites that were launched in 2002. The satellites are in the same orbit around Earth, one about 220 kilometers (137 miles) in front of the other at an altitude of 460 kilometers (286 miles) above the Earth's surface. Together, they measure Earth's gravity field with a precision greater than any previous instrument.

Earth's diverse topography includes mountains, valleys, underground caverns, oceans and glaciers. Since gravity is directly related to mass, and different surface features contain more or less mass than others, slight variations in gravity exist across the surface of the planet.