Earth Time Machine puts a whole day of satellite imagery on a globe for every day since 24 February 2000. Pick a view, drag the timeline or press play, and turn the globe to wherever you like.
Imagery
We acknowledge the use of imagery provided by services from NASA’s Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), part of NASA’s Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS).
- True colour: MODIS Corrected Reflectance (Terra, Aqua) and VIIRS Corrected Reflectance (Suomi NPP, NOAA-20, NOAA-21).
- Night lights: NASA’s Black Marble daily nighttime lights (VIIRS VNP46A2 and VJ146A2, Suomi NPP and NOAA-20), acquired from NASA’s Level-1 & Atmosphere Archive and Distribution System (LAADS DAAC), Goddard Space Flight Center. Product suite: Román, M.O. et al. (2018), NASA’s Black Marble nighttime lights product suite, Remote Sensing of Environment 210, 113–143, doi:10.1016/j.rse.2018.03.017. Before 19 January 2012: NASA’s Earth at Night 2012 composite, labelled as such.
- Snow & ice: MODIS and VIIRS NDSI Snow Cover and Sea Ice.
- Fires: MODIS and VIIRS Fire and Thermal Anomalies, served by GIBS. We acknowledge the use of data and imagery from NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), part of NASA’s ESDIS.
NASA imagery is not protected by copyright in the United States. NASA does not endorse this app. The night-lights colouring and the glow around fires are artistic treatments applied in your browser.
Map data, software and fonts
- Coastlines and borders: Made with Natural Earth (public domain). Shown for orientation only; no position on any boundary is implied.
- three.js r160 and its OrbitControls, © 2010–2023 three.js authors, MIT licence.
- Go fonts, © 2016 Bigelow & Holmes Inc., BSD-style licence. Hosted with this site; no font service is contacted.
Full licence texts: THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.
Privacy and fair use
No cookies, analytics or trackers. The only outside requests are imagery from NASA GIBS: pre-rendered map tiles for the day and area you are looking at. Requests are queued and capped like an ordinary web map, cached by your browser and cancelled when you move on.
More apps
Good to know
- Daily imagery has dark wedges between satellite passes. By default they are filled from another satellite or the day before, named under the date; switch this off in Settings to see a single satellite’s pass.
- Keys: ← → step · Space play · 1–4 views · + − zoom · H whole Earth · L latest. Compare: drag the divider, or focus it and use ← →. Dots on the timeline mark the Moments.