English: This photo was cropped to show the geoid shape of Earth which looks like a perfect sphere inside a square frame picture but the picture is 9 pixels wider (1138 px x 1129 px)

The Himawari-8 satellite is the first unit of the Japan Meteorological Agency's third generation of geostationary satellites. Acquiring visible, near-infrared and infrared images of the Asia-Pacific region, data provided by the satellite are vital for global geostationary coverage. The advanced imager on Himawari-8 gives us a preview of what we can expect from NOAA's GOES-R satellite after it launches in October 2016. Full hemisphere images at 4096 by 4096 pixels are processed every 10 minutes, and can be found on our FTP site. The time tag of the file name is Eastern Standard Time. This image was taken at 0320 UTC on February 10, 2016.

These true color images are now being produced using a new process called the Simple Hybrid Contrast Stretch (SHCS) method developed by the University of Wisconsin Space Science and Engineering Center and NOAA's Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR). This simple algorithm combines four of the spectral bands from the AHI into a true color RGB image, providing added clarity over previous AHI true color images.