The live globe page, redesigned
The live globe shows every aircraft and every ship the Skydex network hears right now, on a 3D Earth. Earlier today we made it easier to find. This change is about what you see once you are there.
What changed at the top
The page opens with a short header: what the globe is, a button to put your own antenna on it and a button to fly over it in the browser. Below that sit four live numbers: aircraft heard, vessels heard, receivers online and countries with a receiver. They count up once when you scroll to them and carry the time they were measured.
The globe itself now has a status bar. A green Live mark, the current counts, the UTC time of the last update and a Share button live in one row above the globe, so you can see at a glance that it is moving and copy a link to exactly what you are looking at.
The controls are grouped
The buttons under the bar used to be one long row. They are now three labelled groups:
- Show: aircraft, altitude colours, vessels, stations, coverage and the Starlink layer.
- Earth: outline, map or satellite.
- Beyond the Earth: the Tesla Roadster view and a direct link to the Solar System navigator.
That last link is new. Until today the only way to the navigator from this page was to switch on the Roadster view first, and few people did. The link is now always there, and a card further down the page explains what the navigator is.
The page explains itself
Under the globe there are short sections on what the globe shows, what each layer means and where the data comes from: our own ADS-B and AIS receivers, run by volunteers, with exact antenna positions never published. Two panels explain how to add a station and how to fly over the same sky. A grid of cards links to every network page: the ADS-B network, the AIS network, the station leaderboard, both flat live maps, both coverage maps, the world map, the live feed and the directory. The latest network posts and a FAQ close the page.
All of this text comes from the server. Search engines and AI assistants read the same words and numbers a person sees, in all twelve languages, and the page carries structured data describing what it is about and which pages it links to. Every link the old page had is still there.
If something looks wrong on your screen, tell us in Discord.