I can see my house from here

September 22, 2005 4:55 PM

Hi-res satellite photos of Earth Four pages worth, desktop wallpaper sized.
posted by jonson (29 comments total)

Thanks! I didn't know I needed new wallpaper, but soon found out otherwise. I work with this technology, and sometimes forget how damn impressive some of these images are aesthetically. Sites like this provide a helpful reminder to take a step back and appreciate it.
posted by mollweide at 5:34 PM on September 22, 2005

Nice.... wish some of these were my-desktop-sized.
posted by rxrfrx at 5:38 PM on September 22, 2005

wah, not my desktop. There needs to be more wallpaper made for 1680x1050.

The earth images do nicely with a black background though.
posted by corpse at 5:38 PM on September 22, 2005

Crazy stuff -- I almost get vertigo with some of these. Odd how a few of them look like microphotography.
posted by undule at 5:48 PM on September 22, 2005

cool. Thanks!
posted by anomie at 6:05 PM on September 22, 2005

Beautiful photos.
posted by snsranch at 6:11 PM on September 22, 2005

Antarctic karman vortex. What the hell causes this! Unbelievable.
posted by quadog at 6:13 PM on September 22, 2005

Thanks!! New Desk Top!
posted by Balisong at 6:17 PM on September 22, 2005

wah, not my desktop. There needs to be more wallpaper made for 1680x1050.

Or, if you are übercool, like me, a 3360 x 1050 desktop :P

Nice link though jonson, hadn't seen these before. Thanks!
posted by mr.curmudgeon at 6:29 PM on September 22, 2005

Oh yeah!? You need a 19200 x 2400 like mine.. er, like here
posted by tomplus2 at 6:39 PM on September 22, 2005

I saw that monitor and wept.
posted by mr.curmudgeon at 6:54 PM on September 22, 2005

Then I realized you would NEVER find desktops big enough to look good, they'd all be stretched. So that made me feel better. A little.
posted by mr.curmudgeon at 6:55 PM on September 22, 2005

sweet. i love fractal dimension.
posted by gnutron at 6:58 PM on September 22, 2005

For some reason I found the western hemisphere one a while back and I've been looking for the eastern hemisphere one for the longest time, thanks.
posted by Ndwright at 7:05 PM on September 22, 2005

very excellent. i love maps. thanks!
posted by brandz at 7:21 PM on September 22, 2005

I want something like 19200 x 19200 in a 24 inch flat panel monitor. A lot of area is nice, but I think I'd like to see increases in resolution before area, which is of course much more technologically difficult.

I'm still working with a 1024x768 Sony SDM-N50 which was absurdly expensive when I bought it five years ago (2K+, I believe). I occasionally think that I'm way behind the curve now until I look at other monitors and realize that the extremely high quality of this monitor is still very real in relative terms. It's small by today's standards, but damn does it look good (in all ways) and the small footprint is still exceptional. I was thinking about this the other day with the dead spots post. I don't think I have any at all, and this is a five-year old monitor. I bought a lot of very expensive things when I had tons of money and although they're aged now and impoverished feature-wise in relation to contemporary stuff, you can still see in many ways the longer-lasting advantages of generally much higher than average quality stuff. For one thing, most of my stuff hasn't broken, for example. But, I digress.

Anyway, you can apparently still buy this monitor and surprisingly, it's still expensive relative to what LCD monitors cost these days. You can get it for $800. A 15" 1024x768 monitor. Weird, huh? I noticed this because the other day I thought about how much I like this monitor and how much I'd like, and how good it'd look on my desk, if I had two more in a multi-head configuration. Thought for sure I could find these used for pretty cheap on eBay and the like. Nope.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 8:20 PM on September 22, 2005

This one, of the Aral sea, is beautiful in its way but is a photo of a terrible environmental disaster.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 8:25 PM on September 22, 2005

this one was in a metafilter thread- an AskMe, I think. Someone was asking where it was, [a friend had bet him he couldn't find it or something], and He/She was calling upon the MeFi knowledgebase to help him/her to identify the location.

I don't think anyone did, despite trying to check the photo for metadata and whatnot.
posted by exlotuseater at 9:48 PM on September 22, 2005

I had a vague plan to go visit this place next week. It's in my province, and it's were a lot of our electricity comes from. One of the biggest meteor craters on earth and certainly one of the best visible ones. Especially now the closed of its arms and make electricity from the resulting lake.

(But I just found out that it's closed after labour day... So I have to use it as a desktop until then. Good thing my Powerbook is broken and my external screen doesn't work.)
posted by kika at 9:48 PM on September 22, 2005

These are great photos. Reminds me of a book my wife and I have called The Earth from Above.

This post also pointed out to me that the term "gravity wave" is overloaded. Cool. These are not the same things that LIGO is attempting to measure.
posted by teece at 10:00 PM on September 22, 2005

kika, if you rotate that photo 90 degrees clockwise, the lake/crater looks like an angry baby. Which is awesome, because I've been working on a way to generate electricity from a giant angry baby down in my cellar.
posted by jonson at 10:01 PM on September 22, 2005

Oh, and teece, yes, yes, & yes, that book is fucking fantastic. Can't recommend it enough.
posted by jonson at 10:02 PM on September 22, 2005

This is terrific stuff. Thanks jonson.
posted by LeeJay at 5:48 AM on September 23, 2005

I saw the circular outline of Manicouagan on Google Maps and was thinking of posting an Ask MeFi question on what it was and whether it had anything to do with a meteor impact...now I have my answer anyhow.
posted by alumshubby at 6:17 AM on September 23, 2005

Nasa's free WorldWind software ( Windows only, unfortunately, but also Open! Source! ) has links to some Landsat tilesets that some of these shots were taken from, if you'd like new angles on some of these shots.
posted by arialblack at 6:28 AM on September 23, 2005

You can find lots of wallpaper at deviantart.com. You can browse by resolution to find something that fits your monitor exactly, without scaling. Lots of annoying advertising, but otherwise a very good site.
posted by Malor at 6:36 AM on September 23, 2005

I'm sure it's been posted before, but the NOAA Photo Archive has some great desktop images as well. Besides the expected storm and hurricane photos, there are many galleries, including cloud formations, undersea images, historical photos, "space weather," and more. Many of the images are also available in high resolution JPEG format, too.
posted by mkhall at 8:54 AM on September 23, 2005

Excellent, really excellent. I took a while to click through, as I thought it would just be another set of stuff the likes of which I've seen before. I was wrong. Thanks.
posted by OmieWise at 9:12 AM on September 23, 2005

I love these, but they really need to be bigger. High-res flat panels aren't a rarity anymore.

Deviantart is fun, but they don't support for very high-res screens and multiple monitors (there's some in there, but it's hell to find). I currently use one from Plasma Design
posted by I Love Tacos at 11:08 AM on September 23, 2005