The pictures the sky took off us

Newest sealed read: 2026-08-24. We read this source about every 7 days. We hold 12 sealed runs going back to 2026-06-09.

What this page is671 rows held · newest sealed read 2026-08-24

134 of the 671 pictures we hold are too cloudy or too dark to compare, and 42 of the 57 places we watch lost at least one that way.
We keep every one of them. A picture we could not read is still a dated record that we went and looked, and it is sealed the same way as the ones we could read.
The rule is the collector's own and it does not move: at least half the picture readable, no more than two fifths of it cloud. A picture that fails either test is never put next to another one.
537 pictures clear that bar, which is what the 416 comparable pairs on the rest of this feed are built out of.

Real rows out of our sealed copies

These are rows we read out of dated pictures we keep ourselves. The pictures themselves stay public: every row names its scene, so you can go and pull the same picture we read. What is not out there is this — the same fixed list, read the same way every week, with the weeks the sky took off us named rather than skipped.

The 12 places whose pictures we most often could not use, out of 42 that lost at least one across all 12 sealed sets

Site	Where	Pictures we could not use	Pictures we hold	Cloud in the worst of them	That one sealed
MSFT Fairwater Atlantamsft-fairwater-atlanta-ga	Georgia	8	11	100.0%	22 Jun 2026
Coreweave Marblecoreweave-marble-nc	North Carolina	7	12	98.4%	20 Jul 2026
AWS Madison Mega Cantonaws-madison-mega-canton-ms	Mississippi	6	13	100.0%	22 Jun 2026
Google Fort Waynegoogle-fort-wayne-in	Indiana	6	12	100.0%	27 Jul 2026
Google Lancastergoogle-lancaster-oh	Ohio	6	12	67.9%	20 Jul 2026
Homer City Energy Campushomer-city-energy-campus-pa	Pennsylvania	6	12	88.3%	22 Jun 2026
Stargate Lordstownstargate-lordstown-oh	Ohio	6	11	94.5%	6 Jul 2026
Google New Albanygoogle-new-albany-oh	Ohio	5	10	100.0%	20 Jul 2026
Meta Prometheus New Albanymeta-prometheus-new-albany-oh	Ohio	5	10	100.0%	20 Jul 2026
Meta Hyperion Richlandmeta-hyperion-richland-la	Louisiana	5	12	99.8%	13 Jul 2026
MSFT Fairwater Mt Pleasantmsft-fairwater-mt-pleasant-wi	Wisconsin	5	11	100.0%	15 Jun 2026
Meta Jeffersonvillemeta-jeffersonville-in	Indiana	5	12	99.1%	22 Jun 2026

Every one of our 12 sealed sets, and how much of each one the sky let us use 9 Jun 2026 to 24 Aug 2026

Set sealed	Pictures in it	Clear enough to compare	Too cloudy to compare	Sites we could compare with the set before
9 Jun 2026	54	43	11	—
15 Jun 2026	55	47	8	37
22 Jun 2026	56	39	17	37
29 Jun 2026	53	39	14	34
6 Jul 2026	57	43	14	33
13 Jul 2026	57	49	8	40
20 Jul 2026	57	48	9	42
27 Jul 2026	57	47	10	43
3 Aug 2026	53	42	11	37
10 Aug 2026	56	43	13	32
17 Aug 2026	56	47	9	37
24 Aug 2026	57	49	8	44

What this page cannot tell you

This is pictures, not permits. Nothing on this page is a filing, an approval, an announcement or a contract. It is what a satellite picture of the same square of ground showed on two different days. We publish no megawatt figure and no percent-built figure anywhere in this feed, because neither of those things is in a picture, and putting one next to a satellite reading would be inventing it.
Every picture covers the same fixed square, 65,536 pixels of it, centred on the site. That square takes in whatever else sits around the site — fields, roads, a car park, a neighbour's land. A move on this page is a move across the whole square. It is not a measurement inside a boundary, because we do not have the boundary.
Bare ground can fall because grass and crops grew back over the summer, and it can rise because a field beside the site was harvested or ploughed. We do not separate weather and farming from work on the site, and we will not pretend to. On a site surrounded by farmland, read a summer fall in bare ground as the season before you read it as anything else.
A cloudy picture is never compared. We only put two pictures side by side when at least half of each one is readable and no more than two fifths of it is cloud. 537 of the 671 pictures we hold clear that bar. The rest are kept and named on the page about pictures we could not use, not quietly dropped.
Five percentage points is our line and we chose it, so here is the arithmetic behind it. We can compare 416 pairs of pictures. 316 of them move by less than five points and 100 move by five or more. Below five points a reading is inside the week-to-week wobble of this measure, so we do not call it a change.
The day we sealed a picture is not the day the picture was taken. A satellite passes when it passes and the sky has to be clear, so a set sealed on one Monday can carry a picture taken up to 14 days earlier. Both dates are on every row above, and we never present the sealed date as the date the ground looked like that. In 5 of the 100 moves we publish, the later set's picture was in fact taken no later than the earlier set's, because a set carries the newest CLEAR picture rather than the newest one. Read the picture dates, not the sealed dates, when you check a move.
We read this list about once a week and the newest set we hold was sealed on 24 Aug 2026. We do not promise you next week's pictures on this page. If a week goes by without a sealed set, this page starts saying so in its own words at the top, and it will keep saying so until we read the list again.
A cloudy week is a gap, not a reading. If a place is missing from a week here, we do not know what its ground looked like that week and we do not guess. The next comparison we publish for it skips the gap and names both dates it does use.

See the file we hold

You do not have to take our word for what is in the file. Here are 25 rows of the real thing, carrying all 12 of its columns, cut out of the dated copies we sealed ourselves. Nothing in it is made up and nothing in it is tidied up.

Open the 25 rows as a CSVA plain spreadsheet file. It saves to your machine rather than painting itself into a browser tab, and it opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets.
The same 25 rows as JSONThe same rows again, laid out for reading with code.

Nothing on this page is for sale. The sample file is free to read, and so is every row on the page above it.

These 25 rows are a slice of the file, not the whole of it. What we cannot show you here is how far back it goes: the file goes back further than these rows do.

Start the thread

No pay button on this one yet. Email operations@ustechautomations.com. We are not charging for this feed. A monthly price is a promise that a new file turns up next month, and we will not make that promise until we can tell building work apart from a crop growing — in 48 of our 91 recorded moves the bare-ground reading falls while the green reading rises, which is the shape a field closing over makes, and bare and green move in opposite directions in 89 of the 91, so they are one reading and not two. The dated copies below are real and they are free to read. Name the sites or the states you follow. We reply with which weeks we hold for them, and which weeks the cloud took off us, before you spend anything.

Email us about the pictures we hold

Tell us the sites or states you follow in the first email. If a site is not on our frozen list we will say so rather than let you think we watch it.