EarthNow v1.0.0

Release notes

The clouds

A new button on the rail, straight after rotation, lays the clouds over the
globe as weather satellites last saw them. The image is EUMETSAT's world cloud
map: a mosaic of infrared images from several satellites, made every three
hours. Each pixel's brightness sets how opaque its cloud is drawn, between two
thresholds measured against EUMETSAT's own cloud mask over a week of images.
The clouds turn with the globe and sit beneath every marker.

The line beneath the globe gives the image's time in UTC with its age, for
example "Clouds: image of 15:00 UTC, 3 h ago". It marks the image stale once it
is more than nine hours old. A grey veil marks where no satellite sees, mostly
near the poles, so an unseen region never reads as a clear sky. The guide says
what the layer shows and its one limit: an infrared image sees temperature, so
snow, ice and cold high ground can read as cloud.

The layer starts hidden. Nothing is fetched from EUMETSAT until it is shown;
while shown, EarthNow checks once an hour for a newer image and fetches one
only when there is one. The last image is kept on disk, so the clouds still
show without a connection, marked with their age. A failed fetch keeps the
image already held and says why in the provider status popover, under
EUMETSAT.

The window

The smallest window is now 960 by 640, to make room for the new button.

Home

EarthNow's site now lives at https://earthnow.world/.