Recently I found a script written by Claudio Novais to show a nice wallpaper which displays a picture of the Earth, in real time. On my system this looks like this:
Now, I recently got this huge monitor so this didn’t look so well and I decided to change it a little. On http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/ you can find an earth and moon viewer. You can alter the image to your liking. So I created an image of 800px x 800px with a view from 35785 km above, 53°23′N and 6°E (roughly Amsterdam, The Netherlands). With ctrl-u (firefox) I looked at the source from the website and found a line like this:
/Earth?di=09523FEE4A66A46BC0364BAA5DD73780BB5E4B6C16283003C802B34399E 7DBBBBEDD58341A5839B680DEB05E0FB23713949A6000B79A9E35A8BC41D5379746
This was clearly the image I was looking at. So my wget line in the original script now looked like this:
wget http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Earth?di=09523FEE4A66A46BC0364BAA5DD73780BB5E4B6C16283003C802B34399E 7DBBBBEDD58341A5839B680DEB05E0FB23713949A6000B79A9E35A8BC41D5379746 -O world.jpg
The result was quite satisfactory:
But with all this space left I was wondering if I could do a little better. E.g. put a view of the moon on the left side. Using the same procedure as before I found that a picture from the moon, viewed from my place (change E to W and N to S) gave me the following id:
69325F8E2A06C40BA0562BCA3DB757E0DB3421067C425A69A268D908D8A888C8CAF7 784C6E3C34F0AAD9F61851DFC7E463FA324CEA77476FF2E406A776E182D6639D0D6F
The moon is not changing every minute, so downloading it at startup would satisfy my needs. I put the following line in /etc/rc.local (I am on Arch Linux):
wget http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Earth?di=69325F8E2A06C40BA0562BCA3DB757E0DB3421067C425A69A268D908D 8A888C8CAF7784C6E3C34F0AAD9F61851DFC7E463FA324CEA77476FF2E406A776 E182D6639D0D6F -O /home/-username-/.gnome2/moon.jpg
And a black picture with resolution 1820*956 as background.jpg. Find the needed resolution by subtracting the border (2*50px) from your full screen. Then altered the script to use ImageMagick and blend these pictures together:
cd ~/.gnome2/ while [ 1 ]; do COUNTER=0 while [ $COUNTER -lt 60 ]; do wget http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Earth?di=752E4392361AD817BC4A37D621AB4BFCC72237106A544C7FB47ECF3FE5 9BA7C7C2A12448662479F4DE80EE6C08AB9EBD383FFC80379D9932AEB952C01182D 88636F85BB29877916B -O world.jpg composite -bordercolor black -border 50x50 moon.jpg background.jpg backgroundWithMoon.jpg composite -gravity center world.jpg backgroundWithMoon.jpg completeWallpaper.jpg temp=$(stat -c%s world.jpg) if [[ $temp > 1000 ]] then rm world_sunlight_Wallpaper.jpg mv completeWallpaper.jpg world_sunlight_Wallpaper.jpg break fi sleep 5</span> <span style="color:#0000ff;"> let COUNTER=COUNTER+1 done sleep 900 done
The result 
:
