I wonder how hard it'll be to capture some of these images yourself.

NOAA decommissioned it's last LRPT/APT capable satillites.

Russia has a couple open access 137MHz sats available Meteor M2-3 and M2-4 I believe they have become flakey with age, damage and other issues.

Those you could stand in your garden with a simple vdipole antenna and a cheap SDR to capture images.

It seems like someone did just that recently! They used an SDRplay rather than a cheap RTL-SDR but the antenna is simple.

https://gdamdam.github.io/meteor-satellite-reception/meteor-...

That's a really nice write up and the SDR looks quite nice for the price.

It brings back memories one of the things that made radio waves feel "real" to me was a similar setup where we raised and lowered the antenna parallel to the ground and saw the reflections strengthen the received signal or make it nearly vanish.

Are the images made available in realtime anywhere?

Wow, damn nice.

Is this satellite geostationary?

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTG-I2

Somehow I thought this was going to be about a trading card game release.

Why do most (almost all) images of Earth have Africa in front? Are they stock photos? Is it because only the Sahara Desert is frequently visible?

This is the right answer. It's a European GEO satellite that's approaching its assigned longitude of 9.5° East (~ Germany). This is more or less the only viewpoint of Earth it will *ever* have; that's how geosync works.

https://www.esa.int/articles/about-us/directorates/earth-obs...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_orbit

Here's a table of (I think?) all of the GEO weather satellites and their positions,

https://space.oscar.wmo.int/satellitestatuses/status

(If you follow up on any of these, you can find real-time views of the Earth from different vantage points).

Dunno, maybe the person/team are from Europe? Or maybe if you center it on Asia or the Americas you get a side full of just ocean?

It's just the default (0,0) latitude/longitude

Thought this was gonna be a sequel to Magic The Gathering before I clicked.

Pictures of earth from space will never lose their luster for me. I wish money spent on missiles and bombs could be redirected for rockets to launch satellites for scientific purposes.