Help & Tutorials

🔑License & subscription

Your license is managed inside the app, under Settings → License. It shows your tier and renewal date, and lets you deactivate the current machine to free its slot before you move to another computer.

Earth Realtime needs an internet connection. Every layer is a live feed, so the app does not run offline: with no connection it shows a full-screen notice and resumes by itself once you are back online.

Offline grace. If your internet is working but our license server cannot be reached, paid plans (Advanced and Premium) keep running on the last verified license for up to 5 days in any 30-day period, with a banner showing how many are left. One successful check restores the full window. Free and trial plans are verified online each time. If the grace period runs out the app falls back to Free features until it can reach the license server again. Nothing is lost, and reconnecting restores your plan immediately.

Purchases, invoices, taxes and renewals are handled by our merchant of record, Lemon Squeezy, through their secure hosted checkout and customer portal.

See the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for the full terms.

📥Updates

Earth Realtime checks our website for a newer version shortly after it starts and about twice a day after that. When one exists you get a small notice naming the new version, with Download and Later. Nothing is ever downloaded or installed behind your back: Download simply opens the installer link in your browser, and you install it over your current copy when it suits you. Your settings, saved views, watchlists, API keys and recordings are kept.

To check whenever you like, use Check for updates next to the version number at the bottom of this manual. If we cannot be reached (you are offline, or the site is down), it tells you so rather than claiming you are up to date; the automatic check simply stays quiet and tries again later. Either way the app never claims an update exists that it could not confirm.

🌍Getting started

Earth Realtime brings the planet's live activity onto one interactive globe: aircraft, ships, satellites, public transit, live webcams, weather and the world's airports & seaports.

Moving around the map

• Pan: drag with the left mouse button (or one finger).
• Zoom: scroll wheel, the + / − buttons (bottom-right), or pinch.
• Rotate & tilt: right-drag, or Ctrl+drag (two-finger twist on a trackpad); or the ↺ / ↻ rotate buttons on the zoom control. Use the compass button to reset north.

First thing to know: the map starts with most layers off so it isn't overwhelming. Turn things on with the chips at the top-left (Aircraft, Ships, Satellites, Transit, Cameras, Weather, Airports, Seaports). A lit chip = that layer is on.

Earth Realtime needs an internet connection. Every layer on the globe is a live feed, so the app cannot run offline. If the connection drops you will see a full-screen notice, and the app resumes on its own the moment you are back. If your internet is fine but our license server cannot be reached, paid plans keep working on offline grace (up to 5 days in any 30-day period) and a banner tells you how long is left.

The status card (top-right) is your live dashboard. Each row is one domain with a visible / total count: visible is what's currently drawn (the map caps how many markers it renders for performance), total is how many exist in the feed. The bottom row is a memory gauge (🧠 normal, 🔥 elevated, ⚠️ high). The coloured dot at the top is overall feed health, so click the card for the full Data health breakdown.

🧩The layers

Each chip toggles a live data layer. In short:

• ✈ Aircraft: live flights from ADS-B transponders.
• 🚢 Ships: vessels broadcasting AIS.
• 🛰 Satellites: orbiting objects, propagated from TLE orbital data.
• 🚇 Transit: live buses, trams and metros from dozens of cities (GTFS-Realtime).
• 📷 Cameras: a curated catalogue of live webcams worldwide.
• 🌦 Weather: clouds, temperature, precipitation, wind and severe-weather layers.
• ℹ Airports & ⚓ Seaports: static reference layers of the world's airports and seaports.

The next sections explain how to read each one. Tip: enabling many heavy layers at once uses more memory, so if the app feels slow, turn off what you don't need (see Performance & troubleshooting).

✈Reading aircraft

Aircraft come from ADS-B (the position signal modern aircraft broadcast), aggregated from several public networks for the widest coverage.

Icons are chosen per aircraft type: helicopter, small/general-aviation, business jet, or airliner. The icon points in the direction of travel.

Colours follow the mode you pick in Settings → Display:

• By status: blue = flying, red = on the ground.
• By category: commercial (blue), cargo (yellow), military (red), private (purple).

A pulsing red halo marks a distress aircraft (squawk 7500/7600/7700 or an ADS-B emergency flag). These are monitored worldwide and always shown, regardless of the render cap, your current zoom or map position, any active filter, and even when the Aircraft layer is turned off: a lightweight background sweep keeps watching for emergency squawks anywhere on Earth (not just busy regions), so a distress over open ocean, or while you've hidden all the traffic to cut clutter, is still caught. This is what makes the app a real monitoring system, not just a viewer. The halo and the sweep behind it are on every plan, including Free; being notified about a distress (the on-screen toast and the alert Inbox entry) starts at Advanced, and the 🚨 Emergencies dashboard with its audible alarm is Premium.

Click an aircraft for the details panel: callsign, registration country, type, barometric & GPS altitude, ground speed, vertical speed, heading, and (when the aircraft transmits them) extra fields like squawk, selected (autopilot) altitude, indicated/true airspeed, Mach, winds aloft and outside air temperature. A dotted route line (departure → destination) is drawn through the aircraft when its route is known; it stays on screen and follows the plane until you close it.

When the route is known, a Route weather readout samples the winds aloft and temperature at the aircraft's cruise level along the departure→destination path. It shows the average head/tailwind (a headwind slows the flight and burns more fuel, a tailwind speeds it up), plus the strongest wind on the route and a colored strip where each segment is red (headwind), green (tailwind) or grey (crosswind/calm). Data is from Open-Meteo's pressure-level model.

Signal lost. When an aircraft stops broadcasting (transponder off, a receiver dropping out, open ocean) it is not deleted. Its last known position stays available in grey, and Settings → Display decides how far back those are drawn (Off by default). See Last-seen history.

Note: only about a third of aircraft transmit the richer Comm-B fields, so some panels show fewer rows than others: that's the transmitter, not a bug.

The panel shows a representative photo (commercial-licensed) plus a “More real photos … on abpic ↗” link that opens the photographer-hosted gallery for that registration on abpic.co.uk, handy when our bundled photo is sparse.

🚢Reading ships

Ships come from AIS (Automatic Identification System) broadcasts. Each vessel is identified by its MMSI (and IMO number for larger ships).

Colours follow Settings → Display: by vessel type (cargo, tanker, passenger, fishing, tug, sailing/yacht, high-speed, service, etc.) or by status (moving vs stopped).

Click a ship for: name, MMSI/IMO, vessel type, speed over ground (SOG), course over ground (COG), heading, navigational status (under way / at anchor / moored…), declared destination, ETA, and dimensions/draught when broadcast.

A ship broadcasting AIS-SART / MOB / EPIRB distress (navigational status 14) gets the red distress halo and appears in the Emergencies tab. While the Ships layer is on, ship distress is monitored worldwide and always shown: past the render cap, and outside your viewport or filter. (Unlike aircraft, ship-distress monitoring needs the Ships layer on.)

Two kinds of status-14, and why one of them is flagged. Status 14 is set by the transmitter, and a badly configured one can sit on it for days: a boat quietly at anchor that has been broadcasting "distress" since last week is a far more common sight than a real sinking. The app tells the two apart by MMSI, because the dedicated distress devices have their own number ranges (ITU-R M.585):

• Confirmed distress: the MMSI starts 970 (AIS-SART), 972 (man overboard) or 974 (EPIRB). These beacons exist only to be switched on in an emergency, so this gets the full treatment: red halo, the Emergencies row, and the repeating alarm.
• Possible false alert: status 14 from an ordinary vessel MMSI. It is still drawn with the red halo, still counted, still listed in the Emergencies tab and still opens with a red banner (a vessel can genuinely set status 14 by hand, so it is never hidden), but the row and the ship's details panel say “possible false alert — transponder misconfiguration”, and the alarm sounds once for that vessel per session instead of repeating. A different vessel, or a real 970/972/974 beacon, still sounds.

A distress alarm needs a fresh report. The halo, the Emergencies row and the alarm require the vessel to have transmitted in the last 10 minutes. Once it goes quiet for longer the ship stays on the map as an ordinary last-known position (it is not removed, and clicking it still shows when it was last heard), but it stops being reported as an active emergency, because we are no longer receiving the distress. Ships also stop declaring a status the moment they stop broadcasting one: a vessel that sent status 14 once does not stay a SART for ever.

Last-known positions (how old is that dot?). AIS is sparse: a vessel at anchor transmits every few minutes, and one out of range of a shore receiver may not be heard for hours. Rather than deleting a ship the moment it goes quiet, the app keeps its last known position and shows you how old it is:

• Normal colours (green moving / red stopped, or the vessel-type palette): reported within the last 30 minutes.
• Grey means offline: no report for over 30 minutes, drawn the same way an offline road camera is. This is where the ship was; it may have moved a long way since.

How far back grey vessels are drawn is your choice: see Last-seen history below.

Click any ship and the Last seen row gives the exact age (“34 min ago”, “3 h 12 min ago”, “3 w ago”) and which feed reported it. Detailed labels show the age instead of a speed the vessel is no longer making. Trails, close-approach warnings, geofence arrivals and watch alerts only ever use fresh (under 10-minute) positions: an old fix is never extrapolated into a collision warning or a port arrival. Live ships also come first when the render cap is reached, so a harbour full of old contacts can never push the vessels actually moving off your map.

The retained set is saved to disk, so re-opening the app shows a populated ocean immediately (each ship still drawn with its real age) instead of a blank map waiting for the first broadcast.

Ships also carry the curated static cache (names/types persist between sessions), so a vessel you've seen before is identified even before it re-broadcasts its static data.

Plans. The Ships layer starts at Advanced, which also runs every layer together. Free shows one live layer at a time (Aircraft or Satellites), so Ships is not among them.

🕰Last-seen history: "where did it go dark?"

Aircraft and ships do not always stop existing when they stop reporting. A transponder is switched off, a receiver drops out over an ocean, an AIS transmitter goes quiet at anchor. Earth Realtime keeps the last position it heard and lets you decide how far back to look, from the last hour to the last three years.

Two rows in Settings → Display control it, one per domain:

• Ships — include offline (last-known): default 6 hours.
• Aircraft — show last position before signal loss: default Off, because ADS-B is broadcast about once a second, so an aircraft that goes quiet is genuinely unusual and showing every one of them would sprinkle grey ghosts over a live map.

Each offers Off · 1 hour · 6 hours · 24 hours · 3 days · 1 week · 1 month · 6 months · 1 year · 3 years. Objects inside the window are drawn grey; the legend says which window is in force, and clicking one shows exactly how long ago it was heard.

Where the history lives. On your machine, in a small registry file per domain, written every five minutes and kept across restarts. Nothing is uploaded. The files are capped (about half a million entries each, oldest dropped first) and nothing older than three years is kept, so they cannot grow without limit. Widening the window reads that file once: it does not make the app hold more in memory, which is why a three-year window costs no more RAM than a one-hour one.

A retained object is never treated as live. This is the rule the whole feature rests on: a position from last month is history, not an observation. It raises no alarm, wears no “notable” ring, is never dead-reckoned forward, never extends a trail, never feeds a density heatmap, and never counts towards a close-approach or geofence decision. Your render cap is spent on screen first: anything you are recording, then live objects on screen, then retained ones on screen, then live objects off screen, then retained ones off screen. Everything in view outranks everything out of view: nothing you cannot see can take a slot from something you can. On screen, where the two actually compete for your attention, live always outranks retained, so history can never push moving traffic off the map.

Filters. Ticking Signal lost or Offline under Filters → By type → reporting status is a more specific request than the setting, so it switches history on for the session even when the window says Off, using the last 24 hours. A window you chose yourself is never narrowed by it.

Plans. The window length is part of your plan: Free looks back up to 6 hours, Advanced up to 1 month, Premium up to 3 years. Longer options appear with a 🔒 and explain themselves when clicked.

🛰Reading satellites

Satellites are propagated from TLE (Two-Line Element) orbital data using the standard SGP4 model, so each dot is a live, calculated position, not a feed.

Colours by category: communications, navigation, weather, science, space station, amateur, military, other.

Click a satellite for its identity and where it is right now: name, group, altitude, sub-satellite point, NORAD catalog number and international designator. That much is on every plan, including Free.

The orbital analysis starts at Advanced: orbital speed, the orbit itself (class, period, inclination, apogee/perigee, eccentricity), how old the orbit data is, and a visibility section computed for your map centre: whether it's overhead now, its next pass (rise → peak → set times and maximum elevation), and whether it will be sunlit at peak (i.e. potentially visible to the naked eye).

In Settings you can switch the satellite visual between a closed orbit ring (default) and a ground-track (where it actually flies over the turning Earth). Follow a satellite to get visible-pass alerts: see Alerts. The orbit line is Advanced.

Sky-watching:

• “Visible now” (Settings → Display) highlights, with a white halo, the satellites that are sunlit and above the horizon from the map centre while its sky is dark (i.e. spottable by eye right now). Centre the map on your location to use it.
• Coverage footprint: selecting a satellite draws the ground area currently within its horizon (a dashed blue circle that moves with it). This is Advanced.
• Constellations: filter to Starlink, GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, Iridium, OneWeb or BeiDou via 🏢 Filter → by operator.

Plans. The Satellites layer itself is on every plan, including Free. Free shows one live layer at a time (Aircraft or Satellites) up to 250 objects, so switching one on switches the other off. The orbital analysis, the orbit line and the coverage footprint are Advanced, which also runs every layer together.

🚇Transit (buses & metros)

The Transit layer streams live vehicle positions from public agencies using GTFS-Realtime. Coverage spans dozens of cities across North America, Europe and Australia, with more added over time.

Vehicles are coloured by mode (subway/metro vs bus) or status. A vehicle whose agency has sent nothing for over 5 minutes turns grey and stops moving: it is shown where it was when we last heard from it, not where the timetable says it should be by now. Many agencies are keyless and work immediately; a few require a free agency key, entered on that agency's own card under Settings → Transit data (each keyed agency shows a Get key → link beside the box). Some agencies also offer a downloadable network map.

Use the Transit panel to show/hide agencies by country, and the search box to jump to a city's network.

📷Live cameras

The Cameras layer is a curated catalogue of live webcams (street scenes, harbours, wildlife, airports, landmarks) refreshed continuously and health-checked so dead streams are removed.

Click a camera marker to open its live view. Cameras can be filtered by category. Turn on Settings → Display → “Camera density heatmap” to see where webcams concentrate around the world. Because they're live third-party streams, an individual feed may occasionally go offline before the next health check catches it.

Community cameras (live streams posted by other Earth Realtime users) share the same layer and are drawn in violet. They have their own switch, Settings → Display → “Community cameras (user-posted)”, separate from “Curated live streams (YouTube)”, so you can show the curated catalogue alone, the community's alone, or both.

Road cameras add tens of thousands more from open-government transport agencies (Settings → Display → Road cameras). Most agencies are keyless and arrive for everyone. Four issue free credentials you register yourself: Trafikverket (Sweden), Statens vegvesen (Norway), UTIC (South Korea) and netraveldata (North East England). Each one you add puts hundreds to thousands more cameras on the map.

Signing up takes a few minutes per agency and every one is free. See Getting your API keys for the registration link, what each agency asks for, and which box the value goes in.

🧊3D view & Street View

The 3D button opens a tilted view of the current map centre, with terrain and buildings. Two engines are available from the tabs inside the window:

• Vector 3D: keyless, works out of the box, built from open map data.
• Photoreal: Google's photorealistic 3D tiles, available once you add a Google Maps key (with the Map Tiles API enabled).

Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom. The 3D view and the main map stay in sync (move either and the other follows), and switching between the two engines keeps the view you were looking at.

The pegman tool opens Street View wherever you click. While it is armed, blue lines on the map show where imagery exists.

🌦Weather overlays

Open 🌦 Weather for a tabbed panel:

• Overlays, 16 of them: live radar, true-colour satellite, infrared and GeoColor clouds, temperature, feels-like, wind, gusts, precipitation, cloud cover, pressure, humidity, dew point, UV, CAPE and the aurora forecast. Adjust each layer's opacity with its slider.
• Time: a forecast scrubber. Step the overlays forward/back in time and play the animation.
• Models: choose the weather model/provider where more than one is available.
• Severe: tropical storms (NHC, drawn as a 🌪️ cyclone you can click for wind/pressure/track), active fires (NASA FIRMS, needs a free key), earthquakes (USGS) and disaster alerts (GDACS).

Weather data is keyless out of the box except active fires. Overlays are designed to layer under the live objects so you can read, say, aircraft against the wind field.

⚓Airports & seaports

Two static reference layers: every airport (from the public OurAirports dataset) and every seaport / harbour (from OpenStreetMap, gap-filled from the NGA World Port Index).

In Settings choose the scope for each: Major (large/scheduled airports; significant ports) keeps the map clean, or All shows everything. Click any airport or seaport for its details, and a seaport's panel offers a one-tap port arrival/departure alert for ships (see Alerts).

Live activity board: clicking an airport (with the Aircraft layer on) or a seaport (with Ships on) shows the traffic around it right now, grouped by phase (aircraft arriving / departing / on-ground / overflying; ships arriving / departing / moored / anchored / underway), each click-to-locate and refreshing live. It's observed traffic inferred from ADS-B/AIS, not a scheduled timetable. The search radius is adjustable in Settings → Display (airport default 55 km ≈ the 30 nm Class B / Mode-C veil; seaport default 40 km ≈ a typical port-approach / VTS area).

🔎Inspecting & following objects

Click any object (aircraft, ship, satellite, camera, airport, seaport) to open its details panel (top-right). The panel updates live while it's open.

At the top of every aircraft/ship/satellite panel is a ☆ Follow button. Following adds the object to your watchlist so you get alerts about it (and it appears under the 🔔 bell → Rules). Tap again to unfollow (★ Following → ☆ Follow).

Selecting an object highlights it on the map in a distinct pink so you don't lose it. Click empty map or press Esc to deselect.

🔍Search

The search box (top bar, or just press /) is universal. It finds:

• Places & addresses: flies you there and drops a pin.
• Flights: by callsign (e.g. BAW123) or ICAO24 hex.
• Ships: by name or MMSI.
• Satellites: by name (e.g. ISS).
• Transit agencies / cities: flies to the network and turns Transit on.
• Airports: by IATA/ICAO code or name.

Pick a result to fly there and select the object.

🏢Filters

Open 🏢 Filter to focus the map:

• By operator: show only a chosen airline or shipping line.
• By type / category: e.g. only cargo aircraft, or only tankers.
• By physical class: e.g. helicopters, small vs large aircraft.

Filters change what's drawn and the visible counts, but distress traffic always shows regardless of any filter (or the render cap or zoom), so an emergency is never hidden while its layer is on. A small chip shows when a filter is active; clear it from there or the panel.

Notable / rare objects are highlighted with an amber ring: military & special aircraft, naval / SAR / law-enforcement / medical ships, space stations & military satellites, and anything in distress. Turn on Settings → Display → “Show notable / rare only” to hide everything else across all domains. The amber ring itself is off by default: turn “Ring around notable / rare objects” on if you want it. The red distress halo is a separate thing and is never affected by that setting.

🔔Alerts & monitoring

This is what turns Earth Realtime from a viewer into a tool. The 🔔 bell (top bar) opens the alerts centre; a red badge counts unread alerts. New alerts also pop a brief on-screen toast. Three tabs:

🚨 Emergencies is a live, truly worldwide dashboard of every distress: aircraft squawking 7700 (general emergency), 7600 (radio failure) or 7500 (unlawful interference / hijack), aircraft with an ADS-B emergency flag (e.g. "minimum fuel", "no communications", "downed aircraft"), and ships broadcasting AIS-SART. The monitor scans the global feeds in the background, not just what's on your screen, so an emergency anywhere on Earth appears here even if you're zoomed into another continent. Click any entry to fly to it and open its details. What each plan gets: the distress object itself is always drawn on the map (the pulsing red halo, past any render cap, zoom or filter) on every plan including Free. The emergency notification (the on-screen toast plus the Inbox entry and its bell badge) is Advanced. This dashboard, the audible alarm and custom alert rules are Premium.

Ship status 14 comes in two flavours. A distress from a dedicated beacon MMSI (970 AIS-SART, 972 man overboard, 974 EPIRB) is treated as confirmed and alarms exactly as before. Status 14 from an ordinary vessel MMSI, usually a misconfigured transponder left on "distress", is still listed, still haloed and still opens with a red banner, but is tagged “possible false alert” and sounds once per vessel per session rather than repeating, however you meet it, including a followed vessel. That memory is one per session and covers playback too: a vessel that already chimed live stays silent when it comes round again in a replay, and everything starts fresh next time you open the app. See Reading ships for the full explanation.

📥 Inbox is the running history of everything that has fired. Unread items have a dot; click an item to fly to the object/region. Use Mark all read to clear the badge or Clear all to empty it. Opening the Inbox marks items read.

⚙️ Rules holds your watchlist and geofences (below). Each rule has 📍 Locate/Zoom, 🔔 Mute 1 hour, ⏸ Pause and 🗑 Remove.

① Watchlist: open any object and tap ☆ Follow. You'll then be alerted when it does something meaningful:

• Aircraft: takes off / lands; declares an emergency; becomes sunlit & visible (below).
• Ships: gets under way ↔ anchors/moors; changes destination; broadcasts distress; a close-approach risk (below).
• Satellites: an upcoming visible pass (below).

② Geofence: be alerted when anything enters or leaves an area. Open the 📏 measure tool, pick Circle or Area, draw your region, then press 🔔 Save as geofence alert. The zone is drawn on the map (dashed blue). In the Rules tab you can cycle its direction (enter / leave / both). For ships specifically, open any seaport and tap 🔔 Alert on ships here to get automatic arrival & departure notifications (a 5 km ring); likewise open any airport and tap 🔔 Alert on aircraft here for its arrivals & departures (a 9 km ring, wider because aircraft move far faster; note the ring is horizontal only, so a jet cruising directly overhead can also trigger it).

③ Satellite visible passes: follow a satellite (e.g. the ISS). The app predicts its next pass over your observer location and alerts you ~10 minutes before a pass that is sunlit at its peak and high enough to see, i.e. a genuine naked-eye opportunity. Set the observer in the Rules tab ("set to map centre"); it defaults to the map centre.

④ Aircraft "sunlit — visible now": a jet at cruise altitude keeps catching sunlight for ~10–20 minutes after your local sunset, so it glows against a darkening sky. Followed aircraft alert you ("look up 🌇"), and the condition shows as a row in the aircraft's details panel.

⑤ Ship CPA (closest approach): for a followed vessel, the app screens nearby ships and computes the closest point of approach; it warns you when two vessels will pass within ~1 km in the next ~20 minutes and are closing: a collision-risk heads-up.

Notifications & alarm: alerts always show as on-screen toasts and collect in the Inbox. At the top of the alerts panel: 🔔 Desktop also sends an OS notification when the app window is minimized or in the background; 🔊 Alarm is the master sound on/off (same switch as Settings → Alarm sound, which is on by default); 🔁 Repeat / 1️⃣ Once chooses whether the alarm sirens until you silence it or plays a single pass; 😴 Snooze 1h silences all alert notifications for an hour (still logged to the Inbox).

When the alarm is in Repeat mode, a relevant alert sounds continuously and a red 🔕 Silence alarm button appears near the top of the map. Click it to stop the current alarm (the next alert re-arms it; a 2-minute safety stop prevents an endless siren). Ship alerts use a distinct ship alarm tone; aircraft and other alerts use the standard tone. To avoid crying wolf, the looping siren fires for alerts you set up (watchlist, geofence/port, close-approach, satellite passes) and for emergencies that are in your current view or on a watched object. Distant worldwide distress still toasts, badges and chimes once (on plans that include emergency notifications), but won't siren. Snooze is different from the master switch: it keeps the alarm armed but gives you a quiet period.

No spam: every alert has a cooldown, so the same event won't repeat; emergencies already active when you start the app populate the dashboard silently (only new ones toast, and only on plans that include emergency notifications). Mute or pause any individual rule at any time.

📏Measurement tools

📏 opens a precise geo-ruler with three modes:

• Ruler: multi-point great-circle distance and bearing (per leg and cumulative).
• Circle: click a centre then a point on the edge to read a radius / coverage footprint (handy for a satellite's footprint or an aircraft's range).
• Area: click a polygon to read enclosed area and perimeter.

Click to add points, Backspace to undo the last one, Esc (or the 📏 button) to finish. A finished Circle or Area can be turned straight into a geofence alert with the button that appears. Units follow your Settings (metric/imperial).

🔖Saved views & sharing

🔖 Saved views capture an entire workspace under a name: the map location, zoom & style, which layers are on, your filters, airport/seaport & satellite scopes, trails, and active weather overlays. Restore any saved view in one click to jump back to a setup (e.g. "Gulf shipping", "Local plane-spotting", "Storm watch"). Manage and delete them from the same panel.

Share & export (bottom of the 🔖 panel):

• 🔗 Copy view code: copies a code for your whole view; anyone can paste it (the box at the bottom) into their Earth Realtime to jump to the exact same setup.
• ⬇ GeoJSON / ⬇ CSV: export the currently-shown objects (aircraft, ships, satellites, transit, etc.) to a file for use in GIS tools or a spreadsheet.
• 📷 Snapshot: save the map as a PNG image. Works on the vector styles (Dark / Light / Voyager); raster & satellite styles block image export.

⏺Recording & playback

⚙ Settings → Recording is where you capture the live map so you can replay it later. Press the round red ⏺ Record button to start; it turns into ⏹ Stop with a pulsing dot and a running clock, and a matching REC chip appears under the status card (top-right). Click that chip from anywhere to come back here.

Every recording is a named session. Type a name in the box next to the button before you start (or rename it while it runs); leave it blank and it is named for the date and time. Each session remembers:

• The scene: the map style, where you were looking, the zoom, which layers were on, your filters and scopes, trails, and the weather overlays. It is stored with the recording, so the recording knows what it was a recording of.
• What it captured: only the layers that were ON are recorded. Turn Aircraft / Ships / Satellites / Transit on before you press record, or the session will play back empty.

Finished sessions are listed under Recordings: name, how long it ran, its size and when it started. Click one to play it back: the scrubber bar appears along the bottom with play / pause / speed controls, and the scene it was recorded with is shown next to it. 🗑 deletes a recording and its file. Sessions started automatically by Auto-record during emergencies are marked 🚨.

One recording = one file. When you press ⏹, the session is packaged into a single .erec file in the sessions folder inside your recordings folder (<recordings folder> › sessions › <name>.erec) holding everything it captured, the scene it was captured under and the camera movement, in one place. Open recordings folder (.erec) takes you straight there. Everything else inside your recordings folder is Earth Realtime’s own encoded working data: the frames of a recording still in progress, and the list of what you have recorded. It is written encrypted from the first byte, no other program can read it, and there is nothing in it for you to manage: the .erec files are the recordings. There is nothing else to keep beside one: copy it to a USB stick, put it in a backup, e-mail it to yourself, and it plays anywhere Earth Realtime is installed.

• Double-click it in Explorer and Earth Realtime opens it. You can also drag an .erec onto the window, or use 📼 Open recording for playback….
• It only opens in Earth Realtime. A .erec is encrypted and is not readable by other software, a text editor or an archive tool, and it will not open if it has been edited, so what you play back is what was recorded.
• There is no length limit. A recording is saved in chunks and played back the same way (only the few minutes around the playhead are ever unpacked), so a session that ran all day opens as quickly as one that ran for five minutes, and takes no more memory to watch. You may see a brief loading… on the playback bar the first time you jump to a part you have not watched yet.
• Renaming a recording changes the name in your list. The file keeps the name it was made with, which is the name it comes back under if you ever copy it to another machine.
• Recordings made before this version are still stored as raw 15-minute files. Those are converted automatically the next time the app starts; the ⬇ button on a row does it on demand. Convert them: unconverted recordings are still subject to the retention window below.
• Drop an .erec into the sessions folder (restoring a backup, say) and it appears in your Recordings list on the next start.
• If a recording's file goes missing (you deleted it, or the drive it lived on is unplugged) the row says file missing and still plays, from the raw data it was built from, for as long as that data is inside the retention window. Press ⬇ to rebuild the file before it isn't.

Coming next: loading a recording will also restore the map to the scene it was recorded with. Today the scene is saved and shown, but the map is left where you are.

Retention bounds the silent background buffer only: the rolling history the app keeps so you can jump back in time without having pressed ⏺. Anything older than the window is deleted automatically. Your saved recordings are exempt: once a session is packaged into its .erec file, that file is yours until you delete the recording with 🗑, however old it gets, and Sessions on disk in the status block shows what those files cost. (The 15-minute working files a recording was built from are cleared once the .erec exists, so a recording is never stored twice.) Change folder… moves recordings to another drive (an external SSD, for example), which is useful because a busy map at high render caps writes a lot. 📼 Open recording for playback… opens in the sessions folder, so your .erec files are the first thing you see.

Recording one object. Right-click any aircraft, ship, satellite or transit vehicle and choose Record this… with a duration. When that recording ends (you press Stop, its duration runs out, or the app is restarted after it finished) it is packaged into its own .erec in the same sessions folder, named for the object (ships-244660000-….erec), and opens the same three ways as any other recording. It then appears in your Recordings list beside the ones you made with ⏺, marked with the object’s own icon and read as Ship · CFAOC. Click it to play it back, 🗑 to delete it. (There is nothing to rename or convert: it is already one file.)

While a per-object recording is still running its frames are in Earth Realtime’s encoded working data, and it is listed under All recording files instead; clicking it there plays what has been written so far. If a recording ever fails to be packaged you are told so, and the raw file is kept and tried again the next time the app starts, so nothing is thrown away.

Auto-record emergencies (the object itself) (Settings → Recording, off by default). This is the monitoring station working while you are not watching. The moment an aircraft or a vessel goes into distress, the app starts a per-object recording of that object by itself, the same recording you would have started by right-clicking it, so the event is captured from the minute it began rather than from the minute you noticed. The watching is done by the app itself rather than by the map, so it survives a restart of the map view, and for aircraft it keeps working with the Aircraft layer switched off, because the app sweeps the world for distress squawks whether or not you are showing aircraft.

• What starts one. An aircraft squawking 7500 (unlawful interference), 7600 (radio failure) or 7700 (general emergency), or transmitting an ADS-B emergency flag; and a vessel broadcasting distress from a dedicated distress beacon: an AIS-SART, a man-overboard unit or an EPIRB (MMSIs starting 970, 972 or 974). The object must also be currently reporting: a distress signal we stopped hearing half an hour ago is a last-known position, not an alarm, and does not start a recording.
• What deliberately does not. A nav-status 14 from an ordinary vessel MMSI does not start a recording. Status 14 is set by the transmitter, and a misconfigured one sits on it indefinitely: there are boats that broadcast "distress" all day at anchor. Auto-recording those would open hundreds of files and use up every slot below, so that a real beacon firing an hour later would find none left. Such a vessel is not being hidden from you: it still gets the red ring, still appears in the 🚨 emergency list, still opens with a distress banner, and is labelled as a possible false alert. If you want a recording of one, right-click it as usual.
• One emergency, one file. A distress that lasts an hour is one recording, not one per update. If you are already recording that object yourself, nothing extra is started: your recording is never duplicated and never interrupted.
• It keeps running after the emergency clears, for about 10 minutes, so the aftermath is in the file too. Then it stops and packages itself into an .erec like any other recording. You can press Stop on it at any time. If the same object goes back into distress within about ten minutes of a recording ending, that is treated as the same event and no second file is made.
• Up to 10 at once. Beyond that, further emergencies are not recorded automatically and you are told so rather than left to wonder. A recording already running is never stopped to make room for a new one. Recordings you started yourself do not count towards the limit.
• You are told each time one starts, and the recording is marked auto · emergency in the tracked list and in the recording's own name, so a file you do not remember making always explains itself.
• Ships need the Ships layer switched on. Aircraft are swept for distress squawks worldwide whether or not you are showing them, but the AIS feed only runs while the Ships layer is on. With it off there is no vessel data arriving at all, so a beacon that starts transmitting then cannot be seen, let alone recorded. A vessel recording already under way does carry on if you switch the layer off. Leave Ships on if you are relying on unattended vessel monitoring.
• The separate Auto-record the whole map during emergencies setting is a different thing and stays off unless you turn it on: it records the entire map as one session for as long as any emergency is up, which is a much larger file. The two can be used together.

Keep computer awake while recording (Settings → Recording, on by default). A recording is only ever as complete as the feeds arriving while it runs, and a sleeping computer receives nothing: a long overnight capture that looked like it "stopped by itself" was the machine going to sleep, not the recording ending. While anything is being recorded (a ⏺ session or a single tracked object) the app asks Windows not to sleep, and lets go the moment the last recording stops.

• It is a request, not a guarantee. On some laptops, particularly "modern standby" machines where the manufacturer's power firmware has the last word, Windows may still enter standby while a recording is running. If that happens the app says so in its log, naming how long the machine was under, so a gap in a recording is explained rather than mysterious.
• Your screen may still turn off. Only the machine is asked to stay awake, not the display. That is deliberate, so leaving a recording running overnight does not leave a monitor burning all night. The recording carries on with the screen dark.
• Switch it off and Windows' normal sleep timer applies, recording or not. If the computer then sleeps mid-recording, the recording is not damaged and it is not stopped: it simply has no data for the time the machine was asleep, and plays back as a gap.
• It does not override a lid close, a manual Sleep, hibernation, or a battery-critical shutdown; it only asks Windows to hold off the idle sleep timer.

Recording and playback are Premium features.

🗺Map style & time travel

The Style dropdown (top bar) switches basemaps: Dark, Light, Voyager, OpenStreetMap, OpenTopoMap, Esri Topo and Satellite imagery. Styles your plan does not include are shown with a 🔒 and cannot be picked. Your live layers carry across styles. Settings → Display also has map brightness / contrast. The compass on the zoom control resets north; use your system's Ctrl + / Ctrl − to scale the whole interface.

Press K for clean / kiosk mode, which hides all controls for a wall display; press K again to exit.

The bar along the bottom is the time scrubber. Once you have made a recording (see Recording & playback), you can scrub back and replay what happened on the map ("time travel"), or play the weather forecast forward.

⛶Full screen (monitoring station)

⛶ Full screen (the button in the top-right group, or F11) turns Earth Realtime into a monitoring station: the window goes properly full screen (no title bar, no taskbar) and the app settles into a control-room view meant to be left running and watched.

What hides. Only the controls, and only once you stop using the mouse and keyboard: after about three seconds the top bars (the layer chips, the Style picker, search and the icon buttons) slide up out of the way, and the mouse pointer disappears over the map. Move the mouse, press a key or touch the screen and they are back instantly. Rest the pointer on one of the buttons, or start typing in the search box, and they stay put for as long as you are there.

What stays. Everything that tells you what is happening: the LIVE status card, the legend, alarms and alert pop-ups, any details panel you have open, and emergency banners. A monitoring station keeps its instruments: it only puts the controls away. (If you want a display with nothing on it at all, that is clean / kiosk mode, so press K.)

Leaving. Press F11 again, press Esc, or click ⛶ after moving the mouse. Esc is polite about it: if a dialog, the manual, a Street View / 3D card or a details panel is open, that one Esc closes what you are looking at and full screen stays. Press it again once nothing else is in the way.

Every keyboard shortcut keeps working while you are in full screen. The mode is not remembered (starting the app always gives you an ordinary window) but it does survive a page refresh, so a long unattended session that reloads itself comes back still full screen.

⚙Settings

⚙ Settings is tabbed:

• Display: colour modes (status vs category) per domain, icon scale, trails, on-map labels, satellite orbit vs ground-track, density heatmaps (aircraft / ships / satellites / transit / cameras), last-seen history windows for aircraft and ships, notable-only & isolate filters, map brightness/contrast, and Auto-reload.

Auto-reload refreshes the page every so often to keep memory fresh on very long sessions. It is off by default: set it to any number of minutes if you want it, or leave it at 0. When it is on it will never interrupt a recording: if a session or a per-object recording is running it waits and tries again later, and when it does reload it tells you why.

• Scope: Major vs All for airports and seaports.
• Recording: the ⏺ record button, your recorded sessions, retention and the folder; auto-record emergencies (the object itself, and optionally the whole map); keep the computer awake while recording. See the Recording & playback section.
• Transit data: download/remove agency network maps; set how long to keep them.
• API Keys: your own provider keys (next section).
• About: version, data-source credits and open-source licenses, and a link to replay the welcome tour.

🔑API keys (bring your own)

Earth Realtime ships without any keys and never asks you to pay us for data: you connect your own free keys, and they stay on your machine. What works without a key vs with one:

• Aircraft: works keyless via public ADS-B networks. Adding free OpenSky credentials raises your rate limit / coverage.
• Ships: need a free AISStream key to stream AIS.
• Satellites, cameras, weather, most transit: keyless.
• Some transit agencies: a free agency key (e.g. 511 Bay Area, TriMet, TfNSW Sydney, NTA Dublin, BKK Budapest). These are entered on the agency's card in Settings → Transit data, not on the API Keys tab.
• Active fires: a free NASA FIRMS map key, pasted into the Severe tab of the 🌦 Weather panel.
• Road cameras from keyed agencies: free credentials from Trafikverket (Sweden), Statens vegvesen (Norway), UTIC (South Korea) and netraveldata (North East England); each one adds hundreds to thousands of cameras.
• Street View live tracking & photoreal 3D: your own Google Maps key.
• Satellites: keyless from CelesTrak; optional free Space-Track login as a backup if CelesTrak blocks your IP.
• 🛰 Premium coverage (EXPERIMENTAL, paid, optional): the free ADS-B networks all share the same volunteer ground receivers, so they share the same blind spots: China, Russia, much of Africa, the Middle East and interior South America are "feeder deserts" with few or no receivers (China also banned them), and no free source can see there. To fill those gaps you can plug in your own paid key for a satellite/commercial provider: AirNav RadarBox (satellite, recommended; 7-day trial), FlightAware AeroAPI, or ADSBExchange (RapidAPI). When enabled it polls only your current map view, slowly, to keep credit use low, and merges that traffic into the map. (Even satellite won't show China domestic flights: that's a government restriction, not a technical one.) Experimental: these commercial adapters follow the providers’ official API specifications but have not been validated end-to-end with a live subscription. Use at your own risk; no support is provided for them.

Enter them under Settings → API Keys. Each provider's signup link is right there. Keys are stored locally and never shared. The next section walks through each provider one by one.

These are your agreements, not ours. A key you register is issued to you by that provider, under their terms. Earth Realtime is the client that connects on your behalf.

🗝Getting your API keys

Every key below is optional and free unless marked paid. Each entry says where to register, what the provider asks for, and where the value goes in the app. Nothing here is sent to us: keys live in your profile on this machine.

A key you register is issued to you, under that provider's own terms. Earth Realtime is the client that connects with it on your behalf.

Settings → API Keys: core providers

• OpenSky Network (aircraft, free): register at opensky-network.org, then create an API client in your account. You get a client ID and client secret (OAuth client credentials, not a username/password). Paste them into OpenSky Client ID and OpenSky Client Secret. Aircraft work without this; the key raises your rate limit and coverage.
• AISStream (ships, free): register at aisstream.io and create an API key. Paste it into AISStream API Key. The Ships layer needs this to stream global AIS.
• Google Maps (optional, paid beyond Google's free tier): create a key in the Google Cloud console (developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/get-api-key). Enable the Maps JavaScript API for live Street View tracking, and the Map Tiles API for photoreal 3D. Paste it into Google Maps key. Street View itself works without a key; the key adds the live view-cone that follows you and the photoreal tiles.
• Space-Track (satellites, free, optional): create an account at space-track.org/auth/createAccount. It asks for a username and password, and both go in as-is. Satellites come from CelesTrak by default; this is the backup used if CelesTrak blocks your IP.

🌦 Weather → Severe tab

• NASA FIRMS (active fires, free): request a MAP_KEY at firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/api/area (about a minute; it arrives by email). Paste it into the FIRMS API key box at the bottom of the Severe tab (not the API Keys screen) and the Active fires layer switches on immediately.

Settings → API Keys → 🛣 Road cameras: free agency credentials. California and Finland (and dozens of other keyless agencies) already arrive for everyone; these add more.

• Trafikverket (Sweden, ~1,500 cameras): register at data.trafikverket.se/register. You get a single API key by email, usable at once. Paste it into Trafikverket key. Licence: CC0.
• Statens vegvesen (Norway, 897 cameras, 147 with live video): email datex@vegvesen.no asking for DATEX II access to GetCCTVSiteTable/GetCCTVStatus for personal, non-commercial use under the NLOD; background at vegvesen.no/fag/teknologi/apne-data/. They issue a username and password: two boxes, not one. Licence: NLOD.
• UTIC (South Korea, ~11,200 live video cameras): apply at utic.go.kr/guide/newUtisDataWrite.do as an individual (개인) and tick the CCTV dataset. The 인증키 arrives by email and is bound to the IP range you declare on the form, so it only works from that network. Paste it into UTIC key.
• netraveldata (North East England, 378 cameras): register at netraveldata.co.uk (Meta → Register) and follow the verification link in the confirmation email. There is no API key: your site username and password are the credentials. Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0.

ASFINAG (Austria) is registered for and licensed (CC BY 4.0), but the agency publishes no camera endpoint we have been able to reach, so its field is hidden and nothing is fetched for it yet, rather than have you sign up for a key the app cannot use. It appears here when that changes.

Settings → Transit data: per-agency keys

• Most transit agencies are keyless. The few that are free-with-registration (511 Bay Area, TriMet Portland, TfNSW Sydney, NTA Dublin, BKK Budapest and similar) show a key box on their own agency card, with a Get key → link straight to that agency's signup page. Save it there and the next poll (within 30 seconds) picks it up, with no restart.

🛰 Premium ADS-B coverage: paid, optional, EXPERIMENTAL

• The free ADS-B networks share the same volunteer ground receivers, so they share the same blind spots. Your own paid key for AirNav RadarBox (airnavradar.com/api, satellite-based, the one to pick), FlightAware AeroAPI (flightaware.com/commercial/aeroapi/) or ADSBExchange via RapidAPI fills them. Paste it into the matching box under 🛰 Premium coverage, choose the provider in the dropdown, then tick Enable premium coverage. It polls only your current map view, slowly, to keep credit use low.
• Experimental: these commercial adapters follow the providers' official API specifications but have not been validated end-to-end with a live subscription. Use at your own risk; no support is provided for them.

Several sets of keys. The API Keys screen holds named accounts: add more than one and switch which is in use with ✓ Use this account. Road-camera credentials are re-read on every switch, so the map follows the account you picked.

🩺Data health & performance

Click the status card (top-right) for the Data health panel: per-feed status, last-update time, and rate-limit/key state, so you can tell at a glance whether, say, ships are quiet because nothing's nearby or because a key is missing.

Performance & troubleshooting

• The map caps how many markers it draws (for speed); the status card's visible / total shows when a cap is hiding extras. Zoom in to see more in an area.
• If the app feels heavy, or you ever see a browser "Out of Memory" page, you're likely low on RAM and/or free disk space. Close other heavy apps, keep a few GB free on your system drive, and avoid enabling every large layer (Airports + Seaports + all Transit + Satellites) at once.
• A layer showing nothing usually means it's toggled off, has no key (Ships/Fires), or there's simply nothing in view. Check Data health.

If memory runs high the app steps in before the browser's "Out of Memory" page can appear, and it tells you what is happening rather than just resetting: first a notice naming the figure and the three things that actually help (lower the object caps in Settings → Display, turn off layers you are not using, or reduce the last-seen history windows), then it turns trails off by itself, and only as a last resort does it refresh the page. A refresh never happens while you are recording.

🛠Troubleshooting

A layer looks empty. Open the Data health panel from the status card at the top right. It shows per-feed status, last update time, and rate-limit or key state, so you can tell whether ships are quiet because nothing is nearby, or because a feed is down.

The app feels slow. Every layer has a maximum-rendered cap in Settings. Lowering the caps, switching off trails, and turning off layers you are not using all help. Density heatmaps are far cheaper than individual markers when you only need to see where activity is concentrated.

A road camera says "image unavailable". Agency cameras go offline for maintenance and roadworks. If a whole region is dark rather than one camera, that is the agency rather than the app.

A still camera looks frozen. Most agencies publish a new frame only every one to five minutes, and an empty road at night looks identical between frames. The "frame fetched" line under the image is the reliable indicator, not the picture.

A live stream will not play. Streams are published by third parties and can end without notice. The catalogue is health-checked continuously and dead entries are removed, but a stream can die between checks.

📖Glossary

• ADS-B is Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast: the position signal aircraft transmit.
• AIS is Automatic Identification System: the equivalent for ships.
• ICAO24 is a unique 24-bit hex address per aircraft. A Callsign is the flight ID (e.g. BAW123).
• Squawk: a 4-digit transponder code; 7500/7600/7700 are emergencies.
• MMSI / IMO: a ship's radio ID / permanent hull number.
• SOG / COG: speed / course over ground. AIS-SART: search-and-rescue distress beacon.
• TLE / SGP4: orbital data / the model that turns it into a live satellite position. NORAD #: catalog number.
• GTFS-Realtime: the open feed standard for live transit vehicles.
• CPA: Closest Point of Approach between two vessels.
• Geofence: a region you draw that triggers alerts on entry/exit.

💬More help & privacy

You are reading the complete manual: every section the app ships with, plus the extras above. If something is still unclear, or you have hit a bug, the contact form reaches info@earthrealtime.com and a person reads every message.

Privacy. Earth Realtime is privacy-focused: your API keys, saved views, watchlists and settings stay on your device and are never sent to us. The full detail is in the Privacy Policy.

You can replay the app's welcome tour any time from Settings → About.