Stormy Blue Dot

March 2, 2018 12:04 AM

From the Himawari 8 Japanese weather satellite: an animation of Earth from Geostationary Orbit covering October 2017.
posted by figurant (11 comments total)

This is absolutely amazing.
posted by dominik at 12:17 AM on March 2, 2018

Fantastic stuff. I tried to play this at 8K on my ancient PC and heard robotic laughter coming from my speakers.
posted by zardoz at 1:28 AM on March 2, 2018

Evening came and morning followed, another day.
posted by Reverend John at 6:35 AM on March 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Watching the south-and-west coast of Australia rebuff almost every cloudbank coming up from the Antarctic.
posted by achrise at 6:53 AM on March 2, 2018

I take it that the brighter spot that travels across the Pacific is the reflection of the sun, just like it reflects off a glass office building. Somehow, I thought it would have be more diffused, not such a light bulb.
posted by bendybendy at 8:18 AM on March 2, 2018

The best time to see the lights of Japan at night are in the day or two after the two hurricanes(?) sweep through (second one?).
posted by straight at 8:22 AM on March 2, 2018

I put this on full screen on a Retina 27" iMac... ooooh pretty.
posted by azpenguin at 9:13 AM on March 2, 2018

I do wonder how the night images are processed - I guess that's based on infra-red, as there's no light to bounce off the top of the clouds. Except from the Moon, and that wouldn't look like that across a month.

Scott Manley's channel had an interesting piece on high resolution Earth imaging yesterday.
posted by Devonian at 9:14 AM on March 2, 2018

Shockingly beautiful.

I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that Earth has nascent versions of the bands that dominate our images of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune.
posted by jamjam at 9:32 AM on March 2, 2018

Similarly, you can generate these loops for any date/length of time at the GOES-East site. Fiddle with the length in the URL to change the amount of time it generates.
posted by msbutah at 10:14 AM on March 2, 2018

And damn those fools who screwed up the plan to get continuous imagery from Triana, aka "GoreSat" or DSCOVR.
posted by hank at 10:54 AM on March 2, 2018