The live map
The map is the default view and it needs no account. It renders on the GPU, so thousands of moving objects stay smooth, and it loads lazily — a layer costs nothing until you switch it on.
Open /view (bottom left) to switch layers. They are grouped by domain, and the groups split by point of view: most belong to Earth, the Space group appears when you pull far enough back.
Your selection persists between visits.
#Aviation
| Layer | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Commercial | Airline flights, tracked live by ADS-B |
| Private | Small private and general-aviation planes |
| Private Jets | Business jets — who is flying where, right now |
| Military | Military aircraft that broadcast openly |
Positions come from the public ADS-B networks — adsb.fi and adsb.lol — with OpenSky Network as an additional source. Refreshed about every three minutes.
Aircraft that do not broadcast, or that broadcast with their identity suppressed, are simply absent. Absence from this layer is not evidence of absence from the sky.
#Maritime
| Layer | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Ports & Chokepoints | 52 major ports and the 10 narrow straits trade depends on |
| Military Ships | Navy and coast-guard vessels reporting their position |
| Tankers | Oil, gas and chemical tankers under way |
| Cargo / Container | Container ships and bulk carriers moving goods |
Ports and chokepoints are a fixed reference set — 52 and 10 of them. Vessel positions are live AIS, from aisstream.io and the national services of Norway (Kystverket) and Finland (Digitraffic), refreshed a little under every two minutes.
The same caveat as aviation, more strongly: AIS is a transponder, it can be switched off, and vessels that would rather not be seen switch it off.
#Space
| Layer | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Military & Recon | Spy and military satellites passing overhead |
| Navigation (GPS…) | The satellites your maps and phones navigate by |
| Commercial & Weather | Communications, imaging and weather satellites |
| Space Stations | Crewed stations in orbit — the ISS and Tiangong |
| Deep Space | Sun, Moon and planets in their real positions |
Orbits are propagated from public orbital elements published by Celestrak and SatNOGS, refreshed hourly. Zoom out far enough and satellites rise to their real orbital height and the star field appears.
Solar activity from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center and NASA drives the Sun readout and the space-weather event list in the Cosmos app.
#Surveillance
| Layer | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Traffic Cams | Public road cameras showing live traffic |
| Live City Feeds | Public city cameras with a live picture |
| Webcams | Open webcams — coasts, mountains, landmarks |
| Live News Feeds | News channels streaming live from the ground |
Cameras come from transport authorities that publish them — Transport for London, the North American 511 networks, Singapore's open data portal and a curated set of city cameras. The news layer carries 25 broadcaster streams that run around the clock.
Everything here is a feed its owner publishes openly. There are no private cameras in this product.
#Natural hazards
| Layer | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Earthquakes (24h) | Quakes recorded worldwide in the last 24 hours |
| Low / Active / Major Fires | Heat signatures by intensity, seen from orbit |
| Volcanoes | Volcanoes showing eruption or heat activity |
| Storms | Hurricanes, storms and severe weather events |
| Sea Ice | The sea-ice edge and drifting ice hazards |
Sources are the public scientific feeds: USGS and the European EMSC for earthquakes (refreshed every 15 minutes), NASA FIRMS for fire detections, NASA EONET for volcanoes, storms and ice, and the US National Weather Service for severe-weather alerts.
A fire marker is a thermal detection from a satellite pass, not a confirmed fire — flares, furnaces and hot roofs land in the same dataset.
#Threats & infrastructure
| Layer | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Conflict Zones | Regions with ongoing armed conflict |
| Front Line (ISW) | Mapped lines of control in Ukraine, from ISW |
| Air Raid Alerts | Ukrainian regions under an air-raid alert now |
| Global Civil Def. | Official emergency warnings issued by governments |
| Nuclear Facilities | Nuclear power plants and reactor sites |
| Global Incidents | Events the world's media is reporting today |
| GPS Jamming | Areas where aircraft report GPS interference |
| Suppliers | Plants and factories key to global supply chains |
This group mixes live feeds with curated data. The front line comes from the Institute for the Study of War and updates roughly daily. Ukrainian air-raid alerts refresh every 45 seconds. Government warnings come from official CAP alert feeds. GPS interference is inferred from aircraft that report degraded navigation.
Conflict zones are a curated set of 13, severity-coded: armed conflict (Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, DR Congo, Yemen), high tension (Syria, the Lebanon border, the Sahel, Somalia, the Red Sea) and elevated (the Taiwan Strait, the Korean DMZ). Curated means a judgement was made, by us, and judgements age.
#Atmospheric
Temperature, precipitation, wind speed, cloud cover, sea-level pressure and humidity, as raster overlays across the whole globe. There is nothing to count here — these are fields, not markers.
#Reading the map honestly
Every layer is built from openly published data, and that shapes what the map can tell you:
- It shows what broadcasts. Quiet things are invisible, and the interesting things are often quiet.
- Feeds have latency and gaps. A position is where something last said it was, not where it certainly is now.
- Detections are not identifications. A heat signature, a media mention or a jamming report is a signal, not a fact about the world.
- Curated layers carry our judgement, not a measurement.
When a feed is failing, its row in /view says so — unreachable, or degraded when an upstream is partly answering. Worth a glance before concluding that an empty region is a quiet one.
#Sharing and saving what you see
The share control saves the current view — position, zoom and active layers — as a link. /places keeps your saved views as named waypoints, alongside the built-in regions and conflicts. See Places, views and replay.