Earth Live Sharp

The first photos of Earth taken from outer space were some of the most fascinating images to be seen by the human eye, and they continue to amaze us even after we’ve seen countless pictures of the globe.

Earth Live Sharp is a small, open-source application that downloads real-time images from the Himawari 8 geostationary weather satellite and sets them as your desktop background. It is unobtrusive and relatively easy to configure.

The images used by the application are obtained from the Himawari 8 weather satellite, which is in a geosynchronous orbit above Japan, capturing photos of the Asia-Pacific region.

A new visible light image is made available every ten minutes, giving you a more or less real-time view of the Earth right on your desktop. As you can probably imagine, though, there won’t be much to see when the Sun isn’t shining on this side of the planet.

There are several image resolutions to choose from, suitable for both low and high-resolution displays. The 1100*1100 option is recommended for 1080p monitors, as higher quality images cannot be zoomed out enough to show the Earth in its entirety.

You can set the update interval to the desired value, and you also have the option of using a private CDN as the images source. This step is recommended for improved stability, and instructions are provided to help you out.

Once the initial configurations have been completed, you can minimize the application to the system tray and just let it to its thing. If the Autostart option is also checked, it will be launched automatically at system startup, which means no additional user input will be required.

In short, Earth Live Sharp is a well-designed app that can deliver real-time images of the Earth straight to your desktop. It is lightweight and user-friendly, and it will not bother you again after you have completed the initial setup.