Hi all! I'm the creator of Stowaway.live and I really appreciate you posting it here.

All this attention has maxed out my Google 3D Tiles quota, so the ground textures in ride-along mode are being throttled. Everything else works — sky, aircraft and satellite tracking, sound — it's just the terrain that may come in flat or missing. I'm working on a caching layer and a proper fallback rather than just buying my way out of it, and I'd take suggestions if anyone's solved this before.

Thanks for checking it out!

• stevage

  today at 5:22 AM

  Before you do that, check whether you'd be violating the ToS by caching tiles. I'm guessing, yes.

• gavinsyancey

  today at 12:05 AM

  There is good free data available. Consider using EASA Sentinel satellite tiles for the imagery, and JAXA's ALOS Global Digital Surface Model for elevation. And the USGS has higher-resolution lidar elevations in much of the US.

  • codetiger

    today at 5:48 AM

    I built a terrain height map completely from free data. https://codetiger.in/earth/

  • jheising

    today at 12:17 AM

    I will look into this, thanks! In the meantime I'm going to implement a fallback to 2D tiles which has much higher quota limits. Try to stop the bleeding first.

  • globular-toast

    today at 5:58 AM

    Europe LiDAR data: https://sonny.4lima.de/

• johschmitz

  today at 6:40 AM

  Maybe provide an option for the user to bring their own API key for prettier results.

• awad

  today at 12:10 AM

  This is very neat! Great job :)

  I can empathize with your quota....was gifted a FlightWall recently (https://theflightwall.com) and it constantly throws a 'too many flights' indicator given that I live in a major metro with quite a bit of air traffic. I'm sure it was thrilling and terrifying to see your usage spike. Wishing you all the best of luck!

  • turbocon

    today at 3:05 AM

    This is really interesting, I'm making something similar as a gift for my wife ( I didn't know this product existed). It's much smaller but shows a map of planes and their live location in the air space near our home.

    I have to say though, it's very weird you're hitting API rate limits. airplanes.live is a free no-authentication needed API that lets you poll it 1 time per second, and with each poll it returns flight information for ALL flights in up to (I think) a 250nm radius.

    I doubt this commercial product could use that API but my point is that this data isn't that valuable. Additionally for the size of the thing the could just put and adsb receiver in it....

    • icameron

      today at 3:12 AM

      Not OP but the API limits are for the earth imagery tiles which cost paid credits from Google. Not the flight info.

      • Arn_Thor

        today at 5:47 AM

        I think they were talking about the Flight Wall, which doesn't use Google Earth imagery, only flight data

• d3Xt3r

  today at 2:10 AM

  Does this also generate atmospheric weather effects based on real-time weather data? Like if it's raining, would you see rain?

• Animats

  today at 2:26 AM

  Ah, that's why the ground is just a grey-green surface.

• tgv

  today at 5:38 AM

  Don't waste too much on it. I fear popularity is brief.

I love this: the sound effects oddly are what really make it. It was quite something clicking a flight, turning round to see behind it, and recognising my location.

What surprised me is how satellites far away (in the night zone, it's daylight for hours yet) could still 'see' me, or rather, I could see them not even that close to the horizon. I would love to see how far away one of the objects is when clicking or hovering over it.

Pretty amazing. One of those great sites that is just "wow, I would never have thought of trying to build that". And I'm glad you did.

This is super cool. Made me happy to see what's up in the sky. Bookmarked for when I need a pick-me-up!

I love it. I use it to try to trick people into believing it's a live view, and that I work for the government.

Super cool. I like how you can hop from plane to plane. However, once I hop to a satellite, it seems like I'm stuck there. It'd be nice if there were more options from that point.

Nice work! I got lost in a clouds only view after setting my location but I’m sure I’ll figure it out, the first couple flights were over an unfamiliar area but worked fine.

I wish I could see Google Maps labels like this during a real flight!

Wow, this is really great!

Great idea.

This is so very cool.

Since I'm here, the why:

When I was a kid — back when travelling still felt new and exciting — I would see a plane crossing the early evening sky and try to put myself in it. Not to go anywhere in particular. I just wanted to know what the world looked like from up there, right then, to whoever was sitting by that window.

The feeling was strongest at sunset. I'd be watching a good one from the ground and think about how much better it had to be from up there, above the haze, with the light coming in level. The same sunset from a perspective I couldn't reach.

Travel has lost most of that. Airports, queues, delays: everything wrapped around flying has got steadily worse. But the flying itself hasn't changed. An hour into a clear evening flight, forehead against the glass, looking down at a world you almost never see from that angle, and it is still one of the quietly moving experiences I know.

Stowaway is that part, without the rest of it.

• BLKNSLVR

  today at 5:37 AM

  > forehead against the glass, looking down at a world you almost never see from that angle

  I'm surprised by how few people seem to do this. I feel like I'm the only adult acting like a child when I do it. Look around and see most everyone else treating it like a night time bus ride through a tunnel.

  P.S. Great project name. Stowaway. Perfect.

• KuhlMensch

  today at 4:01 AM

  I'm in Central Spain at 5:30am... I was pleasantly surprised to hear crickets. If not for the for the sound of fan and aircon - that is what I would be able to hear coming from my window.

  I checked from Brighton, UK, and there is perhaps the same crickets (and birdsong for this time).

  I found it quite compelling.

  Be cool if you scaled the volume to latitude and chirp-rate to temperature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolbear%27s_law)