All 22 layers explained

How to read this list

Layers fall into two groups. Live layers are fetched from an upstream API over the network, so they can rate-limit, lag or occasionally be empty. Bundled layers ship as static data inside the app, so they always render instantly and never fail.

A "key required" label means the feature will not populate until you add a provider key. On the hosted version those keys are not configured, so those particular layers return a clear “not configured” message rather than failing silently.

Live layers

Live Flights

Civil and commercial aircraft broadcasting ADS-B, drawn as modelled airframes that rotate to their real heading. Data comes from the OpenSky Network, with a keyless fallback to the adsb.lol point API for bounded regions. Selecting one unlocks Cockpit view, which places the camera inside the aircraft.

Full coverage needs OpenSky OAuth client credentials. Anonymous mode works but is rate limited.

Military Flights

Military aircraft highlighted separately in amber so they stand out from civil traffic. Sourced from adsb.lol's military filter, and it carries roughly 24 hours of trace history per contact, so you can see where an aircraft has been rather than only where it is. No key required.

Satellites

Orbital objects propagated in real time with SGP4 from two-line element sets. Six core groups are available: the stations group (including the ISS), visual bright objects, and the four navigation constellations gps-ops, glo-ops, galileo and geo, with a dense starlink group available too. Roughly 838 objects in the default set. Sourced from CelesTrak. No key required.

Earthquakes (24h)

A rolling 24-hour window of seismic detections from the USGS. The important difference from a flat map is that each event is plotted at its true depth inside the globe rather than encoded as a colour, so a shallow event sits on the crust and a 600 km event sits deep inside the planet. No key required.

FIRMS Active Fires

Thermal fire detections from the VIIRS instruments on NOAA-20, NOAA-21 and Suomi-NPP, published by NASA FIRMS as near-real-time active fire data. This layer gives you a genuinely global picture of burning, including fires that never appear in news coverage.

Requires a free NASA FIRMS MAP_KEY. Without one the layer stays empty and the panel says KEY REQUIRED.

Live AIS Vessels

Ship positions from the Automatic Identification System, brokered through AISStream. Because AIS is broadcast by ships themselves, coverage is excellent on major shipping lanes and thin everywhere else, which is honest about how the underlying system works.

Requires an AISStream API key.

CCTV

Public traffic and street cameras, with each feed projected into the scene it actually looks at rather than pinned to a flat map marker. Around 3,600 cameras from municipal and government open-data programmes, including Austin Open Data, TxDOT ITS in Texas, Caltrans in California, Transport for London's JamCams, Ontario 511, Digitraffic and Fintraffic in Finland, DriveBC, Tallinn's ristmikud, Estonian and German public cameras, Live Traffic NSW and Open Calgary. Google Street View is used as a fallback. All keyless.

Radio

Geolocated radio stations you can actually listen to, from the crowdsourced Radio Browser directory. Stations are plotted at their transmitter coordinates with an analog-style tuner interface, and audio streams direct from the broadcaster. No key required.

Street Traffic

Road network geometry pulled from the OpenStreetMap Overpass API, which is how the app knows where roads are at all. With a TomTom key it adds real live flow tiles and colour-codes congestion. Without one it runs a clearly labelled built-in simulation, so you can still see traffic behaviour but it is not real measurements.

Transit

Live bus, tram and rail positions from seven GTFS-Realtime operator feeds: MBTA in Boston, CapMetro in Austin, Metro Transit in the Twin Cities, HSL in Helsinki, OVapi in the Netherlands, Entur in Norway and TransLink in Queensland. You can follow an individual vehicle and see its recent trail. No key required.

Bikeshare

Station and dock availability from roughly 30 GBFS operator systems including Citi Bike, Divvy, Capital Bikeshare, Bay Wheels, Bluebikes and BCycle. Useful for answering "are there bikes near me" without opening an app. No key required.

Directions

Routing drawn onto the globe itself. Requests go to the FOSSGIS OSRM servers, which are open infrastructure, so no key is needed. Routes are rendered in 3D along real road geometry rather than as a straight line.

Mapped Installations

Military installations derived from OpenStreetMap tags through Overpass, so this is a mapped dataset rather than a verified or authoritative list. Optionally enriched with Google Maps Places when a key is available. No key required for the base layer.

ALPR Cameras

Mapped locations of automatic licence plate recognition cameras, taken from OpenStreetMap nodes tagged as surveillance infrastructure. This is a map of where cameras are known to be publicly mapped — it is not evidence of enforcement activity and it is inherently incomplete, because plenty of cameras are never mapped.

Space Missions (30d)

Upcoming launches over the next 30 days from The Space Devs Launch Library 2, including rockets, launch sites and schedules. No key required for anonymous use, though anonymous access is limited to about 15 calls per hour.

Bundled layers (always offline, never fail)

These ship as static data inside the app, so they render instantly on first load and cannot be rate limited or broken by an upstream outage.

Submarine Cables

712 undersea cables and 1,917 landing points from the TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map. This is the layer that makes internet geography legible: it shows that connectivity is not evenly distributed, and that entire regions depend on a small number of physical cables. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Datacenters

4,351 facility points from an OpenStreetMap extract, under ODbL 1.0. A useful layer for understanding where compute is physically concentrated.

Dams

704 major dams and reservoirs from an OpenInfraMap and OpenStreetMap extract, under ODbL 1.0. Relevant context for water security and hydro geography.

Astronomy

Star catalogues including Hipparcos bright stars, plus planets and moons, galaxies, nebulae, clusters and black holes. This one is entirely offline, which means you can tilt to the horizon on a moonless night, turn off the basemap and see the sky.

Global Context

Not an independent dataset. This layer derives a proximity roster from the layers you already have enabled — aircraft, vessels and installations — and surfaces what is near your current camera position. It is only useful once some of those layers are on.

Bhote Koshi Flood and Bhote Koshi Locator

A worked example of a specific event, bundling Vantor imagery crops and a GeoPera-derived river centreline so you can step through a flood event with a playback timeline. Licensed CC BY-NC 4.0. These two exist to demonstrate what a full event package looks like.