Tukuk-OS🛰️ Live Earth
Today's satellite view of the whole planet · day, night lights & high-res · fly anywhere
Live Earth is the whole planet under your fingers, seen from space. Flip between today's true-color satellite pass, the night side where city lights trace where people actually live, a crisp Blue Marble reference, and a high-resolution street-level satellite — all keyless imagery served straight to your browser. Search any place to fly there, or use the layer box (top-right) to change what you are seeing. Two overlays stack on top of any of those views: place labels, and live traffic — the measured flow of the road, green to red, refreshed every couple of minutes, which is the layer that stops being about the planet and starts being about your commute.
What each view actually is
True-color (day) is a mosaic the satellite stitches every single day from light reflected off clouds, ocean and land — so haze, smoke plumes and the swirl of a developing storm are all real and current. Night lights come from a day/night band sensor sensitive enough to pick up individual cities, gas flares and even moonlight glinting off clouds; the lights you see are genuinely where people are after dark. Blue Marble is NASA's cleaned composite reference — cloudless and sharp, ideal for reading coastlines and deserts. High-resolution switches to a commercial satellite basemap that lets you zoom into airports, districts and harbours.
Why it is free (and what it is not)
Every layer here is published by NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services or a national geographic archive for exactly this kind of use — no account, no API key, no usage limit on your side. The imagery is refreshed on the providers' schedule (typically about a day behind for the daily composites), so this is a living snapshot of the planet, not a real-time video feed, and clouds are sometimes in the way — that is the honest weather, not a bug. For routing between places use Maps & Navigation; for a single full-disk portrait of Earth use EPIC; and for the fuller story behind these layers — why a daily composite beats a live feed — read how free satellite imagery actually works — then go deeper on what city lights reveal about us and weather vs map satellites.