We’ve been working with Astro Digital to produce the most usable imagery browser. Today we are releasing Libra, a fork of the Astro Digital browser for open Landsat data. Libra allows you to browse, sort, and download more than 275 Terabytes of open Landsat imagery as easily as booking an Uber.

Liberating Landsat

We love open imagery. The global development organizations and developing governments that we work with use open satellite imagery for everything from evaluating disaster response, to tracking deforestation, to planning for drought. For our partners, open imagery isn’t just a matter of cost; it is a matter of licensing and distribution. They get immediate access to Landsat images and can analyze, manipulate, and distribute with almost no restrictions.

To make Landsat data more useful, we’ve made it easier to use. We built two open source tools for working with Landsat data — Landsat-util and Landsat API. It used to take all day for Development Seed’s imagery specialists to turn Landsat data into imagery layers for online maps. With these two tools, any developer can do it in a matter of minutes.

These tools gave us a huge head start in building Libra. Libra relies heavily on Landsat API to quickly query by date, geography, and cloud cover and get image URLs, scene centroids, scene boundaries, and other metadata. Using Landsat API as a backbone of Libra also encouraged us to make improvements and configuration changes on Landsat API such as changing the limits on requests and returned data and some error handling.

Have a look at Libra and hit us with your feedback @developmentseed.

Feb 16 2015: We’ve updated this post to reflect the Dauria Geo name change to Astro Digital.