Sharing Your Earth Observations
If you would have to find a metaphor to communicate the current state of Satellite Earth Observation, what would that be? To us it seems to be a bit like an alien technology artefact. It’s nice and shiny from the outside, holds information about space and time, grows every day in size and burns holes in data centres around the world. Although we do have access to it, we’re barely scratching the surface of its potential.*
The process of deciphering information hidden in satellite images is killing the speed of progress. Our goal should be to let all this awesomeness to reach the average person, but it’s hard to imagine people using it like GPS anytime soon. It’s not like we’re not moving in the right direction. It just would be nice to get a little push and reach the future a bit faster. We don’t have a DeLorean in store for you, but we do have a new version of Spectator to help you with that!
*If you’re an enthusiast of flat earth theory and alike, please keep in mind that this is just a metaphor, EO isn’t really an alien technology.
How?
All great things were built collaboratively and while everyone these days is throwing AI at everything, don’t you think the greatest computational resource is still 7.5 billion people? The only missing bit is a tool to communicate both the technicalities and the semantics of what you find in satellite images so that others can use it, learn from it or train their AI algorithms based on it. And that’s why we‘re happy to introduce Observations. Observation in Spectator allow you to create shareable webpages with data you collected, processed and described for particular events, phenomena or algorithms.
Observations in Spectator allow you to create shareable pages with data you collected, processed and described for particular events, phenomena or algorithms
With Observations you can go from finding satellite images to producing interactive, publicly available content with it for others within minutes. It makes it easier to share and manage data, ideas and results.
The things you have been waiting for
Along the way to building Observations, we also added some major upgrades to Spectator, including many of the things you have been asking for. The most important features and improvements:
- Overpasses for USGS Landsat 8 and Copernicus Sentinel-2 are now cross-referenced with up-to-date acquisition plans so you can instantly know when the next image will be acquired for your area of interest
- You can access Spectator’s functionalities through a RESTful API
- Data access is now 10x faster thanks to redesigned and optimised backend data structures
- Instant download for high resolution preview, basic image processing tools, saving state of image processing for future and more
We wouldn’t be able to build all that without you, so thank you for the support and we hope you’ll enjoy the new features and more stuff we have in store for you this year! Now the only remaining question is:
What’s your next observation?
https://spectator.earth
