Earth Observation

Live Satellite Imagery

The whole Earth from orbit: today's NASA true-colour view, the latest eight-day vegetation map, and the full disc seen by Himawari.

Earth today, true colour

LIVE · ~6 H DELAY

What the Earth looks like to the eye, stitched from the satellite's passes over the day. NASA needs about six hours to assemble each day's image, and the current day is only partly filled in until then. This map therefore shows yesterday's complete image, so the whole Earth is covered.

VIIRS true colour·250 m·Suomi NPP·Image date (UTC) latest daily image·NASA GIBS

Drag to move, scroll or use the buttons to zoom.

Use two fingers to move and zoom the map.

Vegetation health, every eight days

NDVI shows how green the land is. Higher values mean denser, healthier vegetation, values near zero mean bare ground, and negative values mean water or cloud. Each map is an eight-day composite built from the best observations in the window.

MODIS NDVI·250 m·Terra·Latest 8-day composite·NASA GIBS

Drag to move, scroll or use the buttons to zoom.

Use two fingers to move and zoom the map.

Himawari: full disc Earth, daily

LOADING

Himawari-9 is a geostationary weather satellite operated by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). It holds one position above the western Pacific, so it sees the same face of the Earth around the clock, in visible and infrared bands. JMA publishes a new full disc every 10 minutes. Six views are shown below, from the most recent daily harvest: true colour, infrared, dust and haze, two single-band views and a climate composite.

Why Himawari? Unlike polar-orbit satellites that pass once a day, Himawari is geostationary: it stares at the same face of the Earth continuously, producing a disc image every 10 minutes. In the band 13 infrared view, cloud tops glow white against the dark ocean and cyclone spirals are easy to see.

Loading today's Himawari imagery…

Live vs real-time satellite imagery

Live

Live imagery is processed and published some minutes to hours after the satellite captures it. The true-colour map above is live in this sense: NASA stitches the day's passes together, which takes about six hours, and the map shows the last complete day.

Real-time

Real-time imagery reaches a screen within seconds or minutes of capture. Neither map above is real-time, and the vegetation map is not even a single moment: it is a composite of eight days.

What this page shows

Both kinds. The two maps are tile layers refreshed on the satellites' own schedules. The Himawari views are pulled on demand, so they carry the freshest harvest available when you visit.

How the data is fetched

NASA GIBS tiles are public, keyless services designed for use in the browser, so your browser fetches them directly. The Himawari images come from our own storage through an AWS Lambda function, so no upstream address or credential is ever exposed on this page.

When a satellite image on this site carries a date, it is the date the satellite saw the ground, not the date the page was published.

Citations & attributions

  • NASA GIBS. VIIRS true colour and MODIS NDVI. We acknowledge the use of imagery provided by services from NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), part of NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). NASA data is in the public domain. GIBS documentation
  • OpenStreetMap. Base map. © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL). Copyright and licence
  • JMA Himawari-9. Used for scientific and educational purposes under the JMA open data policy. Himawari data from JMA
  • This page. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Map tiles are served by NASA and are not stored on our servers; the daily Himawari views are archived on ihugtrees.org.