Data methods

Machines watching Earth

Orbital Vigil is an experiment in having machines watch raw Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data feeds and surface what they uncover: the beautiful, consequential, sad, terrifying, or hopeful.

Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2

Sentinel-1 is a radar mission. It can observe through cloud and darkness, and it responds to surface roughness, geometry, and water motion. Sentinel-2 is optical and multispectral, making it useful for natural color scenes, vegetation, fires, blooms, snow, and water color.

Bands and recipes

Each image page lists the bands and render recipe used. A Sentinel-1 VV dB image is not a photograph; it is a radar backscatter render. A Sentinel-2 false-color image uses bands outside ordinary red, green, and blue to reveal features that natural color can hide.

Agentic selection

The entire process is agentic. Assignment, download, rendering, art direction, photo editing, final selection, writing, and publishing are structured as machine-run steps that emit JSON records and finished assets. The point is not to imitate a human editor; it is to see what a machine stack notices when it repeatedly looks at Earth.