Before the Internet, anyone willing to independently obtain satellite imagery from the source would need to buy expensive equipment capable of decoding the analog slow scan video images transmitted by weather satellites such as the NOAA APT ones. Today there are four of these NOAA satellites still operational, the NOAA-18, 17, 15 and 19. All of these are sun-synchronous satellites, which means these orbit the earth at around 800 Km of altitude and cross every latitude at approximately the same mean local solar time for each pass. This kind of orbit is useful because of the consistent illumination (by the sun) of the target upon each pass.
