Earth Wallpaper

2025-10-20

I just wanted to share this cool bash script I hacked together after finding an esa API that provides fresh satelite images every 10 minutes.

#!/usr/bin/bash

SWAYBG_PID=""

while true
do
  if [ -n "$SWAYBG_PID" ]; then
    sleep 600
  fi

  curl --output "$HOME/Desktop/.bg.png" "https://view.eumetsat.int/geoserver/ows?service=WMS\
&request=GetMap&version=1.3.0&layers=mtg_fd:rgb_geocolour\
&styles=&format=image/png&crs=EPSG:4326\
&bbox=30,-15,59,38\
&width=2560&height=1440"

  if [ -n "$SWAYBG_PID" ]; then
    kill "$SWAYBG_PID" 2>/dev/null
  fi

  swaybg -i $HOME/Desktop/.bg.png &
  SWAYBG_PID=$!
done

There might be a better way to do this, but putting this into my autostart config works good enough for me. It should work on most wayland based compositors, although I only tested it on the new COSMIC compositor.

You can modify the displayed part of the earth by changing the bbox argument (minLat, minLong, maxLat, malLon) and adjust for different monitor sizes with the width and height arguments. Just make sure you stick with correct proportions – the api doesn’t do that for you.