Yes, the night side uses a combination of infra-red imagery with a static image of the Earth at night. Without that image all the landmass and cities would disappear into black, so it helps give the IR imagery context. And it looks nice. It’s a common technique called GeoColor.
High resolution will be older imagery. You won’t be able to see your house in near real time unless you pay to task a satellite from a commercial provider like Planet Labs.
I'm the developer of Zoom Earth. "Live" is shorthand for "near real-time". But, you're right. Most visitors simply want to see their house from space. Which is understandable, but also kinda depressing. They could look at _anywhere in the world in near realtime_, but they wanna see what their roof or garden looks like.
I guess it's pretty normal to check your own place because you know it well enough to rate the quality of the imagery. In this case, whatever you're using offers better and more recent resolution than Google Earth at greater speed so it's my New Favorite Thing.
> They could look at _anywhere in the world in near realtime_, but they wanna see what their roof or garden looks like.
I'm sure, they are interested in more. They might pick their home first, as they are familiar with it and can compare the pictures you provide with their mental image. You have to gain their trust first.
From which year are the cloudless images shown when deselecting the live/daily layers? There seems to be one per month but all from the same year, right?
It's interesting to see how winter is taking hold of the planet - but a little bit disappointing that I cannot compare snowy areas between different years.
Some details: It combines near real-time images from multiple geostationary satellites, updated every 10 minutes (with a delay of ~30 minutes). NASA GOES satellite for the Americas, Japan's Himawari-8 for Asia and Meteosat in Europe/Africa. Zoomable up to 500m per pixel. Beyond that it uses historical imagery from Microsoft and Esri.
Oh, that's interesting. ESA says they distribute the Sentinel data free of charge as far as I can tell. So I guess the issue is that you'd need to download and host the data yourself, rather than just do an API call to someone else's archive?
There's no reason why native apps and the mobile web can't peacefully coexist and thrive. There isn't going to be a "winner." It's not a zero-sum game. The future will be more of what we have today: more apps, more websites, more devices. But nothing is going to die, or be killed off by the other.
It takes a long time to take satellite/aerial photos of everywhere on the planet in high resolution, so 2018 is quite good in the geospatial industry.