Earth from space

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Now for something completely different. Cloudy all the time here now so I've gone to remote imaging. Very remote!

This image from Himawari 8, a Japanese geostationary satellite out at 37,500km. Since Himawari 8 uses Ka transponders, it's rebroadcast on C band on Jcsat2B 4148H. I used a 2.3 metre satellite dish, C band LNBF with a single LO of 5150, fed to a Novra S300 IP data receiver. HRIT files were created with Kencast software and decoded to jpegs with Xrit2pic. Process by my friend Karol Masztalerz.

Same satellite we get all our weather pics from, except this is directly from satellite. The original images are very high resolution, 11,000 x 11,000 for the visible channel.

[multiweb (Marc)]

Very cool!

[Stefan Buda]

Very cool indeed!
But what a cloudy planet. With this climate change, we'll end up like Venus, with the cloud cover, and we will have to launch our telescopes into orbit.

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Congrats both, that's a fantastic image

[FlashDrive (Poppy)]

Blimey, that's nice ....

[Ryderscope (Rodney)]

Now that is very clever indeed !!

[Derek Klepp]

Great pic thanks.

[Peter Ward]

Wow...that is awesomely cool.

I want one. (Satellite dish)

[batema (Mark)]

Great photo and very novel. Congratulations.

Mark

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Originally Posted by multiweb

Very cool!

Thanks Marc!

Originally Posted by Stefan Buda

Very cool indeed!
But what a cloudy planet. With this climate change, we'll end up like Venus, with the cloud cover, and we will have to launch our telescopes into orbit.

It certainly is cloudy in this image. Makes one wonder how we ever get any astronomy done.

Originally Posted by Camelopardalis

Congrats both, that's a fantastic image

Thanks Dunk!

Originally Posted by FlashDrive

Blimey, that's nice ....

Thanks Col!

Originally Posted by Ryderscope

Now that is very clever indeed !!

Thanks Rodney! I had an LNBF fault at first and the software side of it I needed help. But the hardware, dish etc was setup by me.

Originally Posted by Derek Klepp

Great pic thanks.

Thanks Derek!

Originally Posted by Peter Ward

Wow...that is awesomely cool.

I want one. (Satellite dish)

Thanks Peter! My backyard is full of dishes. I actually used to build satellite dishes. They are somewhat similar to telescope making with FD ratios and what not.

Originally Posted by batema

Great photo and very novel. Congratulations.

Mark

Thanks Mark! We are looking forward to some very high resolution cyclone images from this setup.

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

This is what higher res looks like. Can still go higher but would need more manual processing in Photoshop and my computer is not very happy with me using 11K files at the moment lol.

Taken at 4:20pm this afternoon.

High resolution gibbous Earth from Himawari 8 at 0620UT.

Received with a 2.3 metre solid dish, Zinwell C band LNBF (LO 5150) downconverted to 1002 MHz, fed into a Novra S300 satellite IP data receiver. Himawaricast on Jcsat2B 4148 GHz horizontal. Kencast software to create HRIT files and Xrit2pic for combining and jpeg conversion of the HRIT files.

B5 channel was used for red.
B4 channel was used for green.
Visible channel was used for blue.

Luminance was then overlaid from the visible channel.

This thing has 14 channels so I'm going to have fun figuring out the combinations.

Bigger at Astrobin ---> https://astrob.in/382171/0/

[Mickoid (Michael)]

That's fantastic Kevin, very enterprising and thinking outside the box - way outside the box! Do you require permission to acquire the data from the satellite, or can anyone with the appropriate equipment access this?

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Thanks Michael. Anyone can access it. Maybe one day such information will become encrypted. It already is on some satellites. It would be a shame, but that's how business works.

[Suzy]

So cool!

When I saw the thread name I went say what ! come again?!
This is the first time I've seen our planet on the solar system thread .
Great work Kev, look forward to the cyclone pic.

[CJ (Chris)]

As others have said, very cool!

[sharpiel]

If I see correctly there are 3? Low pressure systems evident as circular spiral cloud systems..? One towards the far limb off the west coast of western Aus is in both pics. I'm no weather specialist but is that a pre-cyclonic formation...?

Or just twirly clouds?

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Originally Posted by Suzy

So cool!

When I saw the thread name I went say what ! come again?!
This is the first time I've seen our planet on the solar system thread .
Great work Kev, look forward to the cyclone pic.

Thanks Suzy. About time Earth made an appearance lol.

Originally Posted by CJ

As others have said, very cool!

Thanks Chris!

Originally Posted by sharpiel

If I see correctly there are 3? Low pressure systems evident as circular spiral cloud systems..? One towards the far limb off the west coast of western Aus is in both pics. I'm no weather specialist but is that a pre-cyclonic formation...?

Or just twirly clouds?

I only see one cyclone Les. Others might be swirly clouds?

Here's a couple more of crescent Earth and the cyclone. I've rotated the images 120 degrees.

[ChrisV (Chris)]

The earth is flat !!! You'll never convince me.
Very nicely worked out though -even if it's all fake

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Originally Posted by ChrisV

The earth is flat !!! You'll never convince me.
Very nicely worked out though -even if it's all fake

Haha, yeah I see you've had a run in with them too.

[bananas (Peter)]

Great work