Aursee

From the ground

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VIIRS resolves 375 m from 800 km up: one pixel is forty hectares and carries a temperature, not a scene. These pictures were taken by people who were at the fire. They record what the pixel does not: what was burning, how close the road was, which direction the smoke went.

Every image is re-encoded from decoded pixels when it arrives, so the camera’s own tags — GPS coordinates, serial number, sometimes a name — are not in the file served here. The location under each picture is the fire the sender selected on the map. Nothing appears on this page until a moderator has looked at it.

Submissions come from signed-in readers through the fire panel on the globe. Images are capped at 1600 px and re-encoded; video is stored as sent, up to 40 MB. Open the live map · Statistics · Travel checks