Back in the early 90's, when I first tried GNU/Linux, there weren't many things I could really do with my X session, due to lack of knowledge, skill, confidence and available open-source software. However, I did play with xearth, a program that renders a somewhat accurate image of our planet. A couple of years later it was replaced by xplanet which offered a lot more features and eye-candy options.

With NASA's release of the visible-earth program we suddenly had open access to high detail day/night, bump (relief) and specular (reflection) maps of the earth which can be used as textures with xplanet.

After playing a bit more with xplanet again for a couple of days in order to get realtime satellite positions directly on the desktop (see https://github.com/chron0/xfce-planet) I got frustrated by the cloud layer again. There was a time where some people put up mirrors of the near current (3-6 hours) global cloudmap we could use as a source in xplanet, but now it seems to have been split into some paid subscription model for high resolution and the low resolution image is distributed via CoralCDN, which, although I like the concept, failed constantly in delivering the global cloudmap.

By sheer accident I stumbled upon https://github.com/jmozmoz/cloudmap, so I tried it locally and it worked like a charm which in turn led to the idea to offer the image I need anyways to everyone else who desires to have a fresh high detail cloudmap. And with that the Global Cloudmap Generator was born. A little script creates a new cloudmap every three hours and then commits and pushes it to the public github repo (https://github.com/apollo-ng/cloudmap/) to use github's infrastructure as CDN we can hopefully rely upon.

And you can just get the latest map by grabbing:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apollo-ng/cloudmap/master/global.jpg

If you're interested in how it all works or want to setup your own/independent cloudmap generator, here is a simplified rundown: