Whole Earth images, Does any satellite provide regularly updated ones? Options

[elakdawalla]

There are tons of Earth observing satellites producing gorgeous detailed images, but I'm trying to figure out if any of them is capable of producing full-globe images of Earth on some regularly updated basis. Does anyone here know of such a beast? Are there weather monitoring satellites that do this?

--Emily

[charborob]

Very nice image, except the Moon is not in its correct orientation. We can see features invisible from Earth, namely Mare Orientale and part of the farside

[ugordan]

Very nice image, except the Moon is not in its correct orientation. We can see features invisible from Earth, namely Mare Orientale and part of the farside

I said it's a montage, not an exact scene visible from the spacecraft. The Earth-Moon system did not look like this at any single time during the flyby, the phase angle difference makes that pretty obvious. Think of it as "artistic license" - putting the moon "closer" to the source of illumination because it's at a higher phase angle. As to putting the Moon to the left of the planet (at that time it was waaay up and to the left of Earth), I dunno, this looked more aesthetic to me. I didn't want to put the Moon in an inset box either for that reason.

Rogelio, I can't tell if those are forest fires or not. The official image advisory doesn't mention them, but I've found a site concerned with forest fires which claims the 2005 year was particularly bad in terms of fires in the Amazon (something about reduced rainfall that season). It does look like smoke, but then again, it could be low haze due to air humidity in the region. It's widespread all the way to the Andes so I'm inclined to say that's indeed smoke. I can't find any GOES-East satellite archive going back to August 2005 to better see what that was.