Planet Labs' open satellite feed

I wish Planet had better pricing for nonprofits. I co-run a conservation nonprofit focused on deforestation in Latin America, and our affordable choices are between 2 year old Google Earth imagery, 10m resolution Nimbo imagery (ok, but not sufficiently detailed to be evidentiary), and Sentinel 1 SAR data, which is useful but very noisy. Planet quoted us something like $30k per year for a strip of coastline that represents something like 5% of the territory we're monitoring, so it's just not a viable option under their current pricing model.

Refreshingly doesn't feel like AI. If someone asked me "what does software engineering look like", I would point to this.

The geometry and bbox in these records aren't the same shape, which matters if you're indexing them.

I ran the shoelace formula over the Nepal Pelican footprint from the post. The bounding box around it comes out about 40% larger in area, so somewhere over a quarter of that box is ground with no pixels behind it. That scene is only 3.8 degrees off-nadir as well. The summarize table further down has some going up to 28.9, and those would be further off.

Indexing the bbox is the obvious move because it's four numbers and any database will put an R-tree on it. But coverage queries then hand you scenes for an AOI and the file turns up empty over that part of it. Took me longer than it should have to work out why there was a hole in my mosaic.

Separately, eo:cloud_cover is one number for the whole scene. Sorting on it to find your clearest option over a small area doesn't hold up. 85% cloud can still be clear over the part you want. The UDM2s give you it per pixel, but that's a second raster open per candidate before you can rank anything.

Also checkout https://nlnet.nl/project/Mapterhorn-imagery for planet high-def satellite PMtiles. Not yet released.

Are most of their currently operating satellites servicing Flock - the US surveillance company? Or is it just a naming accident?

Mark Litwintschik's blog is one of the best engineering blogs on the internet. Always practical, with detailed write-ups that make it easy to reproduce workflows. Thanks, Mark.

Where people want to look on this earth is pretty relevent information for the intelligence community, same for "OSINT" databases where you can lookup usernames across social networks

This is cool, learned of two new file extensions: .tle and .parquet

Pictured with three of the worst russophobes and most rabid euro warmongers.

Such a shame.