Earth on the day I was born

We put your city in the middle of a 16° × 16° frame (about 1,100 miles across) and ask NASA GIBS for that day's image of exactly that frame. The frame is a painting; what is inside the window is the photograph.

Daily images start on February 24, 2000. From late 2015 we look at VIIRS first (Suomi NPP, NOAA-20, NOAA-21); before that, or when VIIRS has gaps, we use MODIS on Terra. If more than 0.5% of the frame is empty we move to the next satellite.

When Terra has a gap that Aqua can fill, we joined the Terra photo (crosses around 10:30 a.m.) and the Aqua photo (around 1:30 p.m.). Any black area that remains is where no satellite passed that day. It is left black, never filled in.

Before February 24, 2000 there is no photo of the day. We show NASA's Blue Marble (a map pieced together from 2004 photographs) and say so, with one tap to the first birthday that has a real photo.

A GIBS day is a UTC date. For most places the local daytime pass falls on that date.

The same frame is read as a 160 × 160 grid (0.1° per cell). A cell counts as white when it is bright and nearly colourless. White means cloud or snow: a photo alone cannot tell them apart, so winter mountains count as cloud too.

“Over Seoul” is the ±0.5° box around the city (the four corner ticks on the photo). The white share of that box, in tenths, gets the Korea Meteorological Administration's forecast words: clear is 0–5 tenths of cloud, mostly cloudy 6–8, overcast 9–10.

The photo is cut into three by three. Of the eight outer cells, the one whose word differs most from yours is added to the line. “Show the cloud grid” puts all nine values on the photo.

The line reads one moment in the photo, the morning or midday instant the satellite passed, so it can differ from the daily mean below. It is not a weather record.

The daily cloud amount is NASA POWER's CLOUD_AMT (“The average percent of cloud amount during the temporal period”, on a 1° cell). Only 2001 onward is used: earlier years come from a different product (SRB) and are never mixed in.

“Same date, 20 years” lines up that calendar date in 2001–2020 from clearest to cloudiest and slots your day in. February 29 is compared with February 28. POWER lags two to three months, so recent days are left empty as “pending”.

“Every birthday's sky” is the daily mean on each birthday since. Photos load when you ask. The thumbnails show the first satellite's image as it is, so a black gap can appear.

“The whole Earth that day” is from the EPIC camera on DSCOVR, about a million miles away, from June 13, 2015. We pick the image whose centre is nearest your longitude; if it is more than 60° away, we say the camera was looking at the far side.

An unofficial tool made with NASA's open data. Not affiliated with NASA.

The date and your place rounded to two decimals (latitude, longitude) go straight from your browser to NASA's servers (GIBS, POWER, EPIC). Nothing else does.

Your date and place never go into this site's address and are not stored. Analytics records only whether a photo existed and which satellite it came from.

If NASA's servers are slow or down, the photo or the numbers may not load. The shutter stays closed and you can try again.

Near the date line (longitude ±180°) the local date and the UTC date can be a day apart.