himawari_fetch

Put near-realtime picture of Earth into a directory

A fork of himawaripy.

himawari_fetch is a Python 3 script based on himawaripy that fetches near-realtime (10 minutes delayed) picture of Earth as its taken by Himawari 8 (ひまわり8号) and saves them to a prespecified directory. It also cleans up images older than a day.

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

Configuration

usage: himawari_fetch [-h] [-d DEADLINE] [--output-dir OUTPUT_DIR]
                      [--override-date OVERRIDE_DATE]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -d DEADLINE, --deadline DEADLINE
                        deadline in seconds for this script to finish, set 0 to cancel
  --output-dir OUTPUT_DIR
                        directory to save images and metadata
  --override-date OVERRIDE_DATE
                        UTC timestamp in format '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'

While the script is fetching a new image, it will use around 700 MiB of memory.

You should set a deadline compatible with your cronjob (or timer) settings to assure that script will terminate in X minutes before it is started again.

Installation

Uh. Will have to figure this one out, since I don't want to push it to pypi.

For Mac OSX Users

OSX has deprecated crontab, and replaced it with launchd. To set up a launch agent, copy the provided sample plist file in osx/at.kescher.himawari_fetch.plist to ~/Library/LaunchAgents, and edit the following entries if required

mkdir -p ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
cp osx/at.kescher.himawari_fetch.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/

• ProgrammingArguments needs to be the path to himawari_fetch installation. This should be /usr/local/bin/himawari_fetch by default, but himawari_fetch may be installed elsewhere.

• StartInterval controls the interval between successive runs, set to 10 minutes (600 seconds) by default, edit as desired.

Finally, to launch it, enter this into the console:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/at.kescher.himawari_fetch.plist

Uninstallation

# Either remove the cronjob
crontab -e
    # Remove the line
    */10 * * * * himawari_fetch...

# OR if you used the systemd timer
systemctl disable --now himawari_fetch.timer
# If not packaged but manually created systemd units, also do
rm /etc/systemd/system/himawari_fetch.{timer,service}

# Uninstall the package
# haha, TODO!

<INSTALLATION_PATH> can be found using the command which -- himawari_fetch.

Attributions

Thanks to Bora M. Alper for the maintaining of himawaripy.

The next attributions are kept intact from the original repo:

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.