About
This is website that posts a beautiful image of the earth viewed from space every day. The project initially took place over 2017, when 365 original images were shared, capturing diverse landforms and the interactions of physical and social processes that shape the surface of Earth. Each image originates from data collected by Landsat 8, an American Earth-observing satellite operated by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA). The images are saved at the original resolution and orientation of the satellite product. Using the same scale makes the features of each image comparable and provides a greater context for Earth's surface. Following the original resolution, each image pixel represents an approximately 30-meter by 30-meter patch on the ground and each image is about 85 km wide and 55 km tall.

How it's done
Individual Landsat scenes are acquired using landsat-util from the fantastic team at Development Seed. The scenes are downloaded from either the USGS Earth Explorer or Amazon's S3 servers. Single-band images are combined using GDAL, a software suite for handling geospatial images. These multi-band images are viewed and manipulated using QGIS, a geographic information system. After the visual inspection and tuning of the images, GDAL is again used to crop and translate the data from a 16-bit RGB TIFF to an 8-bit RGB PNG. No post-processing is performed beyond linear stretching. The location of each image is usually determined by comparison of the GeoNames gazetteer and some other web mapping platforms. Additional information within the description of each image is gleaned from various online sources, which can be scant for many of the locales. The images, metadata, and descriptions are held within a filesystem-based content management system that is hand edited along with some helper scripts. The website is constructed with Jinja2 to handle templating. The map on the homepage utilizes Leaflet with the underlying map tiles provided by Carto. Images are hosted on Backblaze B2 behind a Cloudflare CDN. The icons in the footer are from IcoMoon.

License & Copyright
The content of this website is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY). Please attribute Landsat365 and USGS/NASA when using this work.

Contact
Landsat365 is on instagram, twitter, and github with the handle @landsat365. For other inquiries use the email address provided at the bottom of the page.