UPDATE: GOES-East now supported instead of Himawari. Use https://github.com/jakiestfu/himawari.js for Himawari images instead of this. Something has changed about where the Himawari images are saved, and I don't want to spend time tracking it down when there's a perfectly great package already. You can use his script via launchctl the same way you can this one in order to get continually-updated images for your desktop. GOES-East is still supported in this package.

There's a satellite called Himawari-8 which is geostationary over approximately Papua New Guinea. The very excellent people who run this satellite have set up a live stream of the ultra-high-res images that it takes. They are gorgeous.

Similarly, there's another satellite called GOES-East. It's above South America at the equator, and its photos are just as amazing as the Himawari ones. Because the NOAA is excellent people too, they also have live images available.

Inspired by someone awesome on Reddit, and based on a script by celoyd, I built a script that downloads the latest photo. With a plist file for launchd on OS X, I can run this script every ten minutes and always have the latest image on my machine. And then by setting my OS X desktop to a slideshow of the images inside a folder, the latest Himawari-8 or GOES-East photo is always set as my desktop image.

1. Clone this repo
2. pip install Pillow requests pytz tzlocal
3. Pick whether you want images of Australia and Southeast Asia (Himawari) or the Americas (GOES-East).
4. Change the paths set in tmp and out and os.system("rm ...") in himawari.py or goes-east.py and those in himawari.plist or goes-east.plist to paths inside this directory.
5. Try the Python script by running python himawari.py or python goes-east.py just to make sure everything's kosher. It should download an image.
6. ln -s <this-dir>/himawari.plist /Users/<you>/Library/LaunchAgents/ or ln -s <this-dir>/goes-east.plist /Users/<you>/Library/LaunchAgents/
7. launchctl load -w /Users/<you>/Library/LaunchAgents/himawari.plist or launchctl /Users/<you>/Library/LaunchAgents/goes-east.plist to start it running every 10 minutes
8. Go to OS X Preferences > Desktop and Screen Saver and set your desktop to rotate through the images contained in the images directory that you're writing these images to (whatever directory you made out point to).
9. Enjoy!