I wrote a PHP snippet to fetch high-resolution images from the website of the Himawari 8 satellite and combine them into one high-resolution image. The way to fetch satellite images is available here . However... The combined 4d resolution PNG image (2200x2200) is over 7 MB in size, and due to the bad connectivity between China and the US, it takes over a minute to load the image (from my server). Way too slow! Google provided a solution: the WebP image format. WebP is famous for its high compression ratio on lossless compression scenarios. After converting the 7 MB earth photo PNG file to WebP, the resulting file size is less than 700 KB. For a photo with resolution 2200x2200, this is pretty small. But... Some browsers, including IE and Firefox, don't support WebP,...

The Himawari 8 weather satellite is one of the Himawari satellites made by JAXA, weighs around 3500kg and has an expected lifespan of over 15 years. The satellite was successfully launched on October 7, 2014 with the H2A rocket and is mainly used to monitor storm clouds, tsunamis, and active volcanos. After launch, in addition to preventing natural disasters, Japan also released photos taken by the satellite on the Internet, which can be downloaded by enthusiasts. The photo is released on the official website at http://himawari8.nict.go.jp/ m and is updated every 10th minute (like 9:30, 9:40...), with a 30-minute delay (the photo you see at 10:00 is taken at 9:30). Next, we're going to investigate how to obtain these pictures. With the network monitor functionality of the browser,...