About Yearth
A garage project. Except the garage was a chat window.
Why "Yearth"? Your Earth, this year, right now. Not a textbook map or last decade's photo, but the planet as it is at this very moment: what is flying, what is sailing, what is orbiting and what the weather is doing.
Two friends and a planet
In 1976 two Steves built a computer in a garage in California. One had the big idea and would not stop talking about it. The other had the soldering iron and quietly made the impossible work. That is how Apple began.
Yearth began the same way, minus the garage, the soldering iron and the billions of dollars.
One of us is a human: an engineer and a lifelong looker-at-the-sky, who has always wanted to know which plane is drawing that white line overhead, which ship is waiting outside the port, and whether the bright dot crossing the night sky is the International Space Station. One evening the human asked a simple question: is there an open database for this stuff? A few minutes later, the two friends were building a whole planet.
The other is Claude, an AI made by Anthropic. Claude does not drink coffee, does not sleep and has read more API manuals than any human should. That made it the perfect Woz.
The Jobs half - the human
The idea. The "what if you could search any ship by its IMO number?" moments. The "make it fancier" requests. Insisting on day and night. Insisting on air pollution. Insisting, generally.
The Woz half - Claude
The server, the middleware, the orbit maths for over ten thousand satellites, the day-and-night shader, reading every data provider's rules, and refusing to ship anything without thanking every person whose data makes it possible (see Acknowledgements). Also: very calm about rate limits.
"Woz built it, Jobs sold it" - here, the human did the dreaming and the AI did the typing. We are both quite pleased with ourselves.
What you are looking at
The globe is live: new positions arrive every five seconds, and everything glides smoothly in between.
- Aircraft - positions broadcast by planes over ADS-B radio, picked up by thousands of volunteer receivers around the world. Search by tail number (VT-ANA), flight number (AIC101) or ICAO hex code.
- Ships - positions broadcast over AIS radio and collected by shore stations. Search by IMO number, MMSI, name or call sign.
- Satellites - over ten thousand of them, calculated live in your own browser from public orbit data. Search by name (ISS, Starlink) or NORAD number. Click one to see its next orbit.
- Day and night - the Earth is lit by the real Sun, right now. Watch the sunset line glide across the oceans and the city lights switch on.
- Weather - cloud cover, rain and snow, ocean wave height and PM2.5 air pollution, from public weather and air-quality models.
The honest small print
- Do not navigate with this. It is a hobby project for curiosity and learning. Data can be late, missing or wrong.
- Ships far out at sea often disappear, because free AIS data mostly comes from receivers on the coast. A ship's last known position is shown when we have it.
- Military aircraft and warships usually switch their transponders off, so most will never appear. Some aircraft owners also ask networks to hide them, and we respect that.
- The weather layers come from forecast models, updated every few hours. They are not live radar.
Your privacy
No ads. No accounts. No tracking cookies. No selling of anything. The server keeps ordinary short-lived logs so it can stay up and stop abuse, and that is all.
Keep the lights on (and the satellites spinning)
Yearth is free and always will be. There are no ads and no paywall. It runs on donations from people who enjoy it.
What your donation pays for:
- The server that collects live data around the clock and shares it with every visitor.
- The domain name and the content delivery network that keeps the site quick.
- The occasional cup of tea for the human half of the team. (The AI half runs on electricity and compliments.)
The plan for anything beyond running costs: buy ADS-B and AIS receivers and feed the community networks that make sites like this possible. More receivers mean more planes and ships for everyone.
♥ Buy us a coffee The donation link is coming soon.