Comments on: I can see my house from here

I can see my house from here

jonson — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 16:55:51 -0800

Hi-res satellite photos of Earth Four pages worth, desktop wallpaper sized.

By: mollweide

mollweide — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:34:30 -0800

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.

By: rxrfrx

rxrfrx — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:38:06 -0800

Nice.... wish some of these were my-desktop-sized.

By: corpse

corpse — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:38:43 -0800

wah, not my desktop. There needs to be more wallpaper made for 1680x1050. The earth images do nicely with a black background though.

By: undule

undule — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:48:31 -0800

Crazy stuff -- I almost get vertigo with some of these. Odd how a few of them look like microphotography.

By: anomie

anomie — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:05:52 -0800

cool. Thanks!

By: snsranch

snsranch — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:11:36 -0800

Beautiful photos.

By: quadog

quadog — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:13:47 -0800

Antarctic karman vortex. What the hell causes this! Unbelievable.

By: Balisong

Balisong — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:17:54 -0800

Thanks!! New Desk Top!

By: mr.curmudgeon

mr.curmudgeon — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:29:25 -0800

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!

By: tomplus2

tomplus2 — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:39:46 -0800

Oh yeah!? You need a 19200 x 2400 like mine.. er, like here

By: mr.curmudgeon

mr.curmudgeon — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:54:53 -0800

I saw that monitor and wept.

By: mr.curmudgeon

mr.curmudgeon — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:55:54 -0800

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.

By: gnutron

gnutron — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:58:07 -0800

sweet. i love fractal dimension.

By: Ndwright

Ndwright — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 19:05:03 -0800

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.

By: brandz

brandz — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 19:21:13 -0800

very excellent. i love maps. thanks!

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 20:20:51 -0800

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.

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 20:25:59 -0800

This one, of the Aral sea, is beautiful in its way but is a photo of a terrible environmental disaster.

By: exlotuseater

exlotuseater — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 21:48:37 -0800

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.

By: kika

kika — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 21:48:58 -0800

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.)

By: teece

teece — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 22:00:20 -0800

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.

By: jonson

jonson — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 22:01:42 -0800

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.

By: jonson

jonson — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 22:02:17 -0800

Oh, and teece, yes, yes, & yes, that book is fucking fantastic. Can't recommend it enough.

By: LeeJay

LeeJay — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 05:48:00 -0800

This is terrific stuff. Thanks jonson.

By: alumshubby

alumshubby — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 06:17:05 -0800

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.

By: arialblack

arialblack — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 06:28:07 -0800

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.

By: Malor

Malor — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 06:36:19 -0800

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.

By: mkhall

mkhall — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 08:54:42 -0800

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.

By: OmieWise

OmieWise — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 09:12:06 -0800

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.

By: I Love Tacos

I Love Tacos — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 11:08:35 -0800

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