What you see on this globe
Every green arrow is a real aircraft transmitting its position via ADS-B right now — the transponder mandatory for most air traffic over Europe. Orange arrows are military aircraft, recognised from the registration database. Click any of them: you get the flight number, type, altitude, speed and whether it is climbing or descending. "Follow with camera" locks the camera to the aircraft — you can orbit around it while it flies.
The white dot with a ring is the International Space Station. Its position is computed in your browser from orbital elements (the SGP4 algorithm used by satellite trackers); the white line is its orbit for the next hour and a half. The "ISS over the Netherlands" tile shows the next pass visible from your garden. Red circles are earthquakes of the last 24 hours according to the USGS — the bigger the circle, the stronger the event.
Where the Earth image comes from — and why it is yesterday's
The base is NASA's Blue Marble; the "Yesterday's clouds" layer is the picture taken by the Suomi NPP satellite (VIIRS instrument) at 250 metres per pixel. NASA publishes it in the public domain a day after the overpass — so you see yesterday's weather. The "Clouds now" layer is different: an image from the geostationary Meteosat (EUMETSAT) from the last full hour — the disc seen from above Africa: Europe, Africa and the Atlantic. We use hourly imagery because EUMETSAT does not license it; real-time 10-minute imagery is paid and deliberately absent. These are not photorealistic 3D buildings like Google Earth: Google sells those tiles for money, and this module deliberately has no paid component.
Why it costs €0 — and what that means for your business
We built this after seeing God's Eye View, the project a former Google Maps manager released as open source. That project needs a credit card for Google and a server holding keys. Our version needs neither: the data comes from public sources, and the only server-side piece is a Netlify edge function that fetches the aircraft every ten seconds and serves them to every visitor from cache. A hundred visitors from the same region are still one request to the source every ten seconds.
We think the same way for clients: before proposing a paid service, we check whether the same result is possible with what is already free and public. Surprisingly often it is. If you want to learn to build things like this yourself — on your own computer, in four hours — see the 1-on-1 training.
What is not here (honestly)
- Ships — global live AIS needs a key and an agreement; the keyless variant leaves gaps at sea.
- City cameras — the Netherlands publishes no open traffic-camera streams in a form that could be shown honestly.
- Aircraft without ADS-B — part of general and military aviation does not transmit its position, or transmits it with a delay.