Usage tips for the interactive satellite image viewer

The animation portions of this tool require Java.

Ensure that your web browser has Java language support, and that you have it enabled.

Obtaining a single zoomed image.

Make sure the "Single Image" radio button has been enabled, then click anywhere within the image to zoom in on your region of interest. Please be patient if you have a slow connection. This portion of the software does not require that your browser support the Java language.

Animate image below

This button will animate the overview image for the number of frames which you have specified in the "image loop" button. The allowed frames range from 3 to 30. You may want to initially set this value to 3 just to see how well your computer and network connection work. You can always change it later to see more data. Lets try this now. Set the "image loop" list button to a value of three and click on "Animate image below." Within a short while you should see a new screen appear indicating that images are being loaded. If you see a completely red screen something is seriously wrong (Special Notice for America Online (AOL) Users). Hopefully, this does not happen. If it does, try to do a forced reload on the previous page (typically hold down your shift key while clicking the reload or refresh button.) If everything worked correctly, you should see the three frames loading.

A new control panel is now available to control the animation. If one of the frames is bad, you can remove it from the animation by clicking its corresponding green button, making it red (don't show frame.) Choose the "Slower" button to slow down the animation, "Faster" to speed it up. If you make the animation go too fast for your machine, you can always return to the default animation rate by clicking the "Default" button. To stop the animation, choose the "Stop" button. "Play" will resume the animation. While stopped, you can step forward through the sequence by clicking ">" or backward by clicking "<".

Animation radio button.

Select the "Animation" radio button in order to obtain a zoomed in animation sequence for your area of interest. You will need to once again select the number of frames from the "image loop" list button. As with the single image zoom, you will need to click in the overview image at your point of interest.

Zoom Factor

This allows one the ability to control level of detail and geographic area. A High setting provides the best detail, but the smallest geographic region. Medium and Low settings provide less detail, but larger geographic areas.

Map

Map overlay control. You may choose the Standard (default) map, no map overlay (None) or an optional "County" outline map.

Output Image

Choose the Width and Height of the output image you wish returned to you. Choose smaller sizes for faster download on a slow connection.

Quality

Lower values return a lower quality image, but faster download. Larger values such as 75% return better image quality, but result in a slower download.

Map Color

You can change the color of the map on the zoomed data. Choose the color of your choice.

Color Enhancement

An optional control to colorize images when you zoom.

Known bugs

Clicking an image exclude box when it is yellow will not turn the box red, it will most likely stay green, yet not show the frame in the loop.

Resizing the browser window while downloading can cause animation problems. Generally, a forced page reload will clear up this problem.

Interactive weather satellite imagery page

Responsible Official: Dr. James E. Arnold (jim.arnold@msfc.nasa.gov)
Page Curator: Paul J. Meyer (paul.meyer@msfc.nasa.gov)