himawaripy

Put near-realtime picture of Earth as your desktop background

himawaripy is a Python 3 script that fetches near-realtime (10 minutes delayed) picture of Earth as its taken by Himawari 8 (ひまわり8号) and sets it as your desktop background.

Set a cronjob that runs in every 10 minutes to automatically get the near-realtime picture of Earth.

Supported Desktop Environments

Tested

• Unity 7

Not Tested

• GNOME 3
• MATE

Not Supported

• LXDE

• KDE

  Because I simply couldn't find a way to do it. Maybe KDE API?

• ... and all other desktop environments that are not mentioned above.

Configuration

You can configure the level of detail, by modifying the script. You can set the global variable level to 4, 8, 16, or 20 to increase the quality (and thus the file size as well). Please keep in mind that it will also take more time to download the tiles.

Installation

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/boramalper/himawaripy.git

# configure
cd ~/himawaripy
vi himawaripy.py

# test whether it's working
./himawaripy.py

# set up a cronjob
crontab -e
# Add the line:
# */10 * * * * /home/USERNAME/himawaripy/himawaripy.py

Example

Attributions

Thanks to MichaelPote for the initial implementation using Powershell Script.

Thanks to Charlie Loyd for image processing logic (hi8-fetch.py).

Obviously, thanks to the Japan Meteorological Agency for opening these pictures to public.