Satellite view of the White House. Image credit: Google Maps
There are many tools that let you see satellite images of the Earth, but have you wondered if there are any tools out there that let you see live satellite images? Unfortunately, there are no publicly available services that let you see what a satellite is seeing right now. All of the services that let you access satellite images use photographs that were captured at some point in the last few years.
Most of the satellite images services are using the same satellites. For example, Google Maps and Google Earth display satellite images captured by DigitalGlobe and GeoEye. The same goes for images displayed in Bing Maps and Yahoo Maps.
In every situation, the images are gathered by the satellite as it makes its orbit around the Earth. These images are transmitted down to Earth and then updated in the various mapping services. But there is no publicly available tool that lets you see live satellite images.
It’s likely that the military has tools like this, where they have dozens of satellites orbiting the Earth at all times, and can get a live feed from a satellite to look down at a region, but nothing is available right now.
We have written many articles about viewing Earth from space here on Universe Today. Here’s an article about seeing Earth from space, at night. And here’s an article about seeing Obama’s inauguration from space.
We have also recorded a whole episode of Astronomy Cast just about Earth. Listen here, Episode 51: Earth.
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