Earth from orbit
Pictures of the whole Earth received straight from geostationary weather satellites, 36 000 km up, by our own station in Włostowice. Elektro-L3 over the Atlantic now – Elektro-L5 and FengYun-2H over the Indian Ocean coming soon with a second dish. Everything here appears by itself, minutes after it reaches our antennas.
Elektro-L3 ↓ · Elektro-L5 ↓ · FengYun-2H ↓ · NASA images for comparison ↓ · NOAA archive, 2020 · Winds aloft
Our station
Receivers on a Raspberry Pi in the garden, decoding with SatDump on our home server. A 70 cm dish listens to Elektro-L3 on 1691 MHz around the clock. A second 70 cm dish, aimed low to the east-south-east, will receive Elektro-L5 and FengYun-2H, which sit only 3° apart in the sky.
Elektro-L3: the whole Earth
Elektro-L3 hangs over the Atlantic at 14.5°W and photographs a full disk of the Earth – Europe, Africa, the Atlantic and South America. Each picture comes down channel by channel over about half an hour; daytime pictures are combined into colour.
Clouds in motion
The last three days of colour pictures from Elektro-L3. We receive one full disk every three hours; the frames in between are calculated by following how the clouds move (motion interpolation), so the film is smooth – but the in-between frames are estimates, not real pictures. Updated after every new picture.
A day on Earth, in colour
Every colour full disk we receive from Elektro-L3 during the day, joined into a short film each evening. Watch the clouds move and the night come in from the east.
Elektro-L5: the Indian Ocean sidecoming soon
Elektro-L5, launched in February 2026, hangs over the Indian Ocean at 76°E and sees the other half of the picture – Asia, the Indian Ocean, eastern Africa and the edge of Europe. From Włostowice it is low in the sky: azimuth about 118°, only about 13° above the horizon. It transmits on 1691 MHz like Elektro-L3.
FengYun-2H: China's weather satellitecoming soon
FengYun-2H is a Chinese weather satellite at 79°E, just 3° from Elektro-L5 – so the same dish should hear both. It is an older satellite; we will try to receive its full-disk pictures and show here everything that comes through.
Where are our satellites now?
The geostationary satellites we receive or are going to try, plus two student-built amateur-radio CubeSats – MARMOTSat (CO-128, University of Victoria, Canada) and PARUS-6U1 (Taipei Tech, Taiwan) – with their ground tracks and radio footprint – computed from their latest orbital elements (TLE from CelesTrak). They hang 36 000 km above the equator (drawn much lower here so they fit) and keep pace with the turning Earth, so a fixed dish stays on them – the thin line from Włostowice shows where each dish has to point. Drag to turn the globe.
Not received by us · NASA WorldviewFor comparison: NASA satellite images of Polandshow ▾
These pictures are not ours – they come from NASA's Terra, Aqua, NOAA-20 and Suomi NPP satellites via NASA EOSDIS GIBS. They are downlinked to big ground stations with tracking dishes, so they are sharper than what a home station can receive.
Our station vs NASA
Elektro-L3 LRIT, about 4 km per pixel, received in Włostowice with our own dish. The whole Earth every three hours, minutes after the satellite sends it.
NOAA-20 and Suomi NPP, downlinked to big ground stations on X-band (8 GHz) with tracking dishes. Rivers and large lakes are clear.
Terra and Aqua. Kraków, the Vistula and the Tatra snow line are visible. Ready a few hours after the pass.