niwtsol 2 hours ago

Pictures of earth from space will never lose their luster for me. I wish money spent on missiles and bombs could be redirected for rockets to launch satellites for scientific purposes.

bajard 2 hours ago

Why do most (almost all) images of Earth have Africa in front? Are they stock photos? Is it because only the Sahara Desert is frequently visible?

  • xandrius 2 hours ago

    Dunno, maybe the person/team are from Europe? Or maybe if you center it on Asia or the Americas you get a side full of just ocean?

  • matja 1 hour ago

    It's just the default (0,0) latitude/longitude

rustyhancock 5 hours ago

I wonder how hard it'll be to capture some of these images yourself.

NOAA decommissioned it's last LRPT/APT capable satillites.

Russia has a couple open access 137MHz sats available Meteor M2-3 and M2-4 I believe they have become flakey with age, damage and other issues.

Those you could stand in your garden with a simple vdipole antenna and a cheap SDR to capture images.

  • nightjar 4 hours ago

    It seems like someone did just that recently! They used an SDRplay rather than a cheap RTL-SDR but the antenna is simple.

    https://gdamdam.github.io/meteor-satellite-reception/meteor-...

    • rustyhancock 2 hours ago

      That's a really nice write up and the SDR looks quite nice for the price.

      It brings back memories one of the things that made radio waves feel "real" to me was a similar setup where we raised and lowered the antenna parallel to the ground and saw the reflections strengthen the received signal or make it nearly vanish.

PeterStuer 4 hours ago

Somehow I thought this was going to be about a trading card game release.

Geonode 2 hours ago

Thought this was gonna be a sequel to Magic The Gathering before I clicked.