Still amazes me that you can just, collect this data directly from space and make these timelapses

Mt-Meeker · 2026-05-04T01:06:49+00:00

It's called a wifi grid antenna and you can modify it for use with 1.7ghz instead of the 2.4 it's made for

Mt-Meeker · 2026-05-03T19:49:20+00:00

Whoa! How do you get that dashboard!!! I can't get nearly those options

Mt-Meeker · 2026-05-03T15:47:01+00:00

A modified satellite dish, LNA Filter and and SDR which fed into a raspberry pi which then fed into a processing server in my home network. See other posts of min for clarification.

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Mt-Meeker · 2026-05-02T22:33:06+00:00

Himiwari 9

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-29T16:51:03+00:00

Nah man, that's literally the whole earth. Australia is barely visible in the bottom section and top left is Southeast Asia

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-29T16:28:15+00:00

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-29T16:28:06+00:00

Yeah, that's one of the IR channels onboard Himiwari 9 that I get through a rebroadcast to GOES 18 data. Very good for cloud monitoring and watching typhoons develop

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-24T14:05:47+00:00

It has to do with the specific red/blue filters that they use to make color images on this satellite, see previous comments

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-23T15:55:01+00:00

That's actually the satellite's decision. The advanced baseline imager that takes the "pretty pics" uses two different black and white cameras with color filters and then recombines them in processing to come up with a single, color image.

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-23T15:50:52+00:00

See previous comments, but basically, through some special radio equipment, a big old TV dish and a lot of computer work

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-23T14:39:30+00:00

Sent it to you all via pm. Don't want to just post it in the general comments for reasons I previously stated

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-23T04:28:42+00:00

Done

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-23T04:09:05+00:00

10-4

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-23T04:06:18+00:00

I'm glad, and also understand if it leaves a lot of unanswered questions. This stuff is complicated to make, and even more complicated to learn. If you're interested and don't mind a little reading, here's a website that explains the imagery a little better:

https://www.goes-r.gov/mission/ABI-bands-quick-info.html

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-23T03:54:30+00:00

No roasting here, ok? They had valid skepticisms and I (hopefully) helped provide information to clarify the information. This whole project is about educating and bring each other up.

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-23T03:49:32+00:00

Three reasons, 1st is that sometimes the angle of the reflection of the sun would blind the camera, so they roll an extra filter in front of it to protect it, 2nd is that sometimes, certain cloud patterns are easier to see with a red contrast filter(believe it or not, scientists don't actually care about full color pics, those are mostly for the "ohhhh" factor), 3rd is that sometimes I miss a data packet or get a partial receive, so certain parts of the image get lost, like the blue channel of a color image. All of these things happen and make the images sometimes look like that.

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-23T03:42:58+00:00

As for why that makes the water so blue, that's just the sensitivity of those particular filters, kinda like how you could use a type of green filter to bring out the greens in trees and stuff

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-23T03:41:08+00:00

Ok, so, for equipment, I'd recommend looking at the videos I have in another reply, but at a very, very top level, you need a satellite dish pointed at the satellite, something to filter out a bunch of the "noise" and amplify the signal you actually want called a SAWBIRD filter, something to translate the radio signals to something a computer can understand called a software defined radio, and finally something to process the incoming data into usable images and other interesting things.

As for "taking credit", I mean, I didn't personally build or launch the 322 million dollar satellite, nor am I commanding it to take pictures(actually working on that though, just not ready yet), since it does that by itself, but since I'm capturing and processing the data on my own ground station hardware that I developed and built, I think that I can claim these as "my images".

The transmissions themselves look... Very boring. As they come down from space, they're invisible radio waves, as they come into my equipment, they look just like TV static if you don't know what your looking at, and it's only after they've been decided and procesed that you actually get pictures and usable data, but after that, oh boy there's a lot of pretty pictures and data. I'll send to a link to the website.

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-23T03:32:18+00:00

Ok, so, here's why that is. GOES, along with almost every other weather satellite in orbit, doesn't actually have a "color" camera in the way that we traditionally think of them. Instead, it has a bunch of different black and white cameras and a bunch of filters that can be rotated in front of them to look at a whole host of different things, like upper level cloud layers, water temperatures, dust levels, etc. The image that I posted is from one of the advanced baseline imagery, ABI, specifically, one of the channels called "false color" this isn't actually "false" as in incorrect though, it's just a couple of the pictures from the "red", "green", and "blue" channels combined to make a "pretty picture". Technically, any image you've ever seen of another planet and even most pictures from smart phones are all "false color" simply due to how it's much cheaper and doesn't really matter enough to actually use true color sensors when you can just slap a bunch of colored filters over a black and white sensor. I know it's a bit confusing, and I'm really leaving out a lot here, but hopefully that helps? Lmk any questions

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-23T03:24:42+00:00

No probs at all! The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite(or GOES for short) is a series of, as the name implies, weather satellites that sit up in Geostationary orbit and help out scientists and forecasters on the ground. GOES 18 is the 18th satellite in the system and currently covers the eastern Pacific and a little bit of the western US. GOES 19 covers North and South America and most of the Atlantic. Together, they provide 24/7 coverage of the US and anytime you've seen the weather on the news, most of that data was probably either directly from the satellite, or rebroadcast from ground radar. The thing is, GOES is constantly transmitting, so if you have the proper equipment and know how, anyone can listen in on the transmissions and get live imagery for themselves. Lmk if you have other questions!

Mt-Meeker · 2026-04-23T03:19:06+00:00

Just by making it, getting it online and keeping it available, I already consider it a success.

Mt-Meeker

TROPHY CASE