Downlink For Mac

One can never get enough of looking at the Earth. Just ask astronauts who've been on the space station for months and still marvel at the sight. We can't all get to outer space, at least not yet, but we can at least have some pictures of the planet on our desktop.

Downlink gets images captured at regular intervals by multiple weather satellites, both in geostationary and low Earth orbit, and sets them as your desktop wallpaper, providing you with a live view of our planet from outer space.

After installing the app, it will grab the most recent image from the GOES-East satellite and set it as your wallpaper. Since this is a geostationary satellite located at high altitude, it captures pictures of the entire Earth, but smaller features are less visible.

There are a few geostationary satellites to choose from, which observe different parts of the planet, as well as several satellites that are in low Earth orbit and provide close-up views of certain regions. However, these close-up images will have a watermark in the bottom-left corner.

Since the images captured by the geostationary satellites are high-resolution photos, you can zoom in on certain regions of the Earth without a noticeable drop in quality. The app lets you crop a certain part of the image, and it will continue updating your wallpaper with a new cropped image as they are acquired.

Updates can be received every 20 or 60 minutes, but these intervals might not be exact, as certain satellites may provide updates more or less frequently. However, you can also refresh the image manually to obtain the latest available photo.

There are many applications available that offer similar functionality, but Downlink is among the most intuitive. A couple of clicks is all you need to set it up, and then you can just forget about it until you want to select a different satellite.