"Himawari" (ひまわり) is Japanese for "sunflower". 🌻
Himawari 8 is a geostationary weather satellite deployed by the Japan Meteorological Agency. It takes photographs of Earth every 10 minutes.
hi8 is a macOS menubar app that sets the latest image from Himawari-8 as your desktop background every 10 minutes.
This project is alpha quality, please report any bugs! and maybe fix them! 😁
In the future, hi8 will be packaged as an app and downloadable via the releases page.
For now, you can install hi8 via npm.
npm install -g hi8
GraphicsMagick is an image processing library that helps stitch together the satellite images to produce a full picture of Earth.
The high resolution satellite images from Himawari-8 come in fragments like this one. At the resolution hi8 uses, there are sixteen images that need to be stitched together to create a full picture of Earth.
If you have homebrew, you can just brew install graphicsmagick.
If you know of a better (dependency-free) way to process the images (or package imagemagick and graphicsmagick with the application), please let me know!
Once hi8 and GraphicsMagick have been installed, all you need to do is run the hi8 command from a terminal.
hi8 will start in the background and from there it can be managed from the menubar.
Contributions welcome! Please read the contributing guidelines first.
This project has a change log!
Sunflower icon created by Federico Panzano from Noun Project. Used under the CC BY 3.0 US license.
Here are some useful links if you're interested in learning more about the Himawari-8 satellite.
- Himawari-8 Real-time Web
- Himawari Data Guide
- Himawari-8/9 Standard Data User's Guide
- JAXA account registration (for access to more data)
- Glittering Blue: A hi-res video of one day's rotation of Earth viewed from Himawari-8.
- celoyd/hi8: Tools for making animations from Himawari-8 P-Tree data.
- himawari-8-chrome: Himawari 8 New Tab Page (Chrome Extension).
- himawari.js: Download real-time images of Earth from the Himawari-8 satellite.
- himawari-bg: Set the latest image from Himawari 8 as your desktop background.
- himawari-urls: Get URLs for Himawari 8 image tiles based on a given date.
- himawari-history: Download all Himawari 8 images in a date range.
- Himawari-8 animation tutorial: A way to make Himawari-8 animations.
- hi8-deband.py: Python script for correcting noise along scanlines for Himawari-8 images.
- makeday.sh: Bash script for downloading and processing a day's worth of Himawari-8 images.