Re:Stowaway – take the window seat on any plane or satellite...
by gavinsyancey on Monday August 10, 2026 @08:05PM
(#49251569)
There is good free data available. Consider using EASA Sentinel satellite tiles for the imagery, and JAXA's ALOS Global Digital Surface Model for elevation. And the USGS has higher-resolution lidar elevations in much of the US.
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Re:Stowaway – take the window seat on any plane or satellite...
by jheising on Monday August 10, 2026 @08:17PM
(#49251656)
I will look into this, thanks! In the meantime I'm going to implement a fallback to 2D tiles which has much higher quota limits. Try to stop the bleeding first.
Re:Stowaway – take the window seat on any plane or satellite...
by gavinsyancey on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @03:37PM
(#49263359)
Probably your best bet -- EASA has worldwide cloudless imagery [1] (scroll down for a link to their tile server) as well as a worldwide high-resolution elevation model [2]
[1] https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/news/2024-2-27-exploring-new...
[2] https://documentation.dataspace.copernicus.eu/APIs/SentinelH...
Re:Stowaway – take the window seat on any plane or satellite...
by codetiger on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @01:48AM
(#49253824)
I built a terrain height map completely from free data. https://codetiger.in/earth/
Re:Stowaway – take the window seat on any plane or satellite...
by dotancohen on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @11:45AM
(#49260131)
This is really nice. It's _almost_ useful for identifying features from where one stands, if it had another three levels of zoom and another three levels of voxel resolution.
Re:Stowaway – take the window seat on any plane or satellite...
by codetiger on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @09:47PM
(#49266934)
I tried adding more resolutions, but had to balance it against cost of hosting. Each resolution is at least 2x the size of the combined all prev zoom level data. Currently I’ve 9 zoom levels total size 15gb, adding 1 more level takes it to 32gb but looks beautiful. With the current open data, I can generate upto 14 levels
Re:Stowaway – take the window seat on any plane or satellite...
by dotancohen on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @05:38AM
(#49269833)
Yeah, that's a pretty classic tradeoff. Thanks for hosting what you do!
Re:Stowaway – take the window seat on any plane or satellite...
by codetiger on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @06:19AM
(#49270131)
Just in case you are interested, you can recreate this locally using the open source repo. The script downloads the open data and generate the voxels based on configuration. The max resolution is configured which you can increase. Just a few prompts and you can recreate high resolution upto 10m resolution in real world distance. :)
Re:Stowaway – take the window seat on any plane or satellite...
by dotancohen on Friday August 14, 2026 @01:33AM
(#49295048)
Thanks, I might do that. If so, I'll PR a config option. Thank you!
Re:Stowaway – take the window seat on any plane or satellite...
by globular-toast on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @01:58AM
(#49253894)
Europe LiDAR data: https://sonny.4lima.de/
Re:Stowaway – take the window seat on any plane or satellite...
by adamcharnock on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @05:05AM
(#49255225)
It's somewhat old, but NASA has its SRTM height-map dataset. I wrote a project for reading this in Python many moons ago, in case it is of help to anyone:
https://github.com/adamcharnock/python-srtm
I originally used it for doing line-of-sight calculations for a wireless ISP I started.