Coordinates: 54.7024°N, 3.2766°W
UK satellite images from 25cm are ready to search below. Explore free satellite images of the UK, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, or buy high-resolution satellite imagery for any UK site with an instant price. Commercial archive and new-tasking imagery from providers like SuperView Neo and 21AT resolves individual buildings and vehicles; availability and acquisition dates depend on the satellite, the location, and cloud cover.
Yes. The UK is fully covered by both free and commercial satellite imagery, searchable on the map on this page. Free archives like Sentinel-2 suit a whole-country view at 10m. Commercial providers resolve down to 25cm, sharp enough to identify individual buildings anywhere in England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland.
The satellite map below covers England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, including London, Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast, and the wider British countryside and coastline. Pan to an area, then check what archive and new-tasking imagery exists for it, with an instant price estimate before you commit to anything. Satellite imagery is not a live video feed: each scene is a record of one specific pass, so the dates available for your area are what the portal shows.
Jump to satellite images of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland.
The map above is a working satellite map of the UK, not just a viewer: you can search any location, check what imagery dates are available, and request archive or newly tasked imagery for it, all in the same workspace. Use it to view and analyze the latest and historical satellite images of the UK in a few steps:
The three images below are real 50cm commercial satellite images, not free public data, captured by SuperView-1, part of the same commercial satellite family as SuperView Neo, one of the providers available to search and task through the portal above. This is the actual building- and vehicle-scale detail a paid archive search or new tasking order delivers anywhere in Britain, a useful comparison against the free public-archive samples further down this page.
Want this detail for your UK site? Search satellite imagery UK on the map above →
This is what pictures of the UK from space actually look like on a clear day, Great Britain, Northern Ireland, and Ireland in one unbroken view, rather than the single-building detail of a commercial order. Genuinely cloud-free captures like this are uncommon given the UK's weather, which is what makes this particular pass worth featuring on its own.
The three images below are free, publicly available samples from NASA and NOAA, shown here at 250m to 375m resolution, a useful contrast with the real 50cm commercial SuperView-1 samples above. They are not what you get from a paid order: commercial imagery from 21AT and SuperView Neo, searchable and purchasable through the portal above, resolves down to 25cm, sharp enough to make out individual buildings and vehicles rather than just coastline and cloud.
Want this detail for your UK site? Search satellite imagery UK on the map above →
Archive imagery is fast and cheap. New tasking gets you a fresh capture.
Satellite imagery of the UK is priced per square kilometre by resolution and capture mode. Archive scenes already exist and are the cheapest, fastest option. New tasking books a satellite to fly your area and costs more. Every search on this page returns an instant estimate before you order.
| Resolution Tier | Revisit | Archive Price | New Tasking Price | Priority | Emergency | Stereo | Tri-Stereo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25-30cm — Super High Resolution | Daily | $20/km² (min. 25km²) | $30/km² (min. 100km²) | $45/km² | $80/km² | $60/km² | $90/km² |
| 31-50cm — Very High Resolution | 1-3 days | $13/km² (min. 25km²) | $20/km² (min. 100km²) | $37/km² | $66/km² | $40/km² | $60/km² |
| 51-80cm — High Resolution | 3-5 days | $5/km² (min. 25km²) | $8/km² (min. 100km²) | Not available | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| 2m — Moderate Resolution | 4-5 days | $1/km² | $2/km² | Not available | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| 30-50m — Specialized Data (SAR, Hyperspectral, Multispectral) | 20 seconds to 26 days | Custom pricing | Custom pricing | Custom pricing | Custom pricing | Not available | Not available |
Delivery formats are GeoTIFF, SHP, DWG, or UTM. Upload your own area of interest as KML, KMZ, or zipped Shapefile. Archive imagery is typically ready in minutes to 48 hours; new tasking typically delivers within 7 days, weather permitting, with priority and emergency slots faster. Imagery is licensed, not sold, for your internal business, analysis, and reporting use; resale or redistribution needs written consent.
Prices are shown in US dollars. UK customers are invoiced in USD unless another currency is agreed when the order is confirmed.
Both are used across the UK, and they suit different jobs. Satellites cover large and remote areas cheaply. Aerial surveys win on raw detail over a small, accessible site.
| Satellite Imagery | Aerial Photography | |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | Anywhere in the UK, including offshore and upland areas, with no flight planning or airspace clearance | Flown per project, and constrained by airspace restrictions and flight access |
| Revisit speed | Archive available instantly; new tasking typically within 7 days | Scheduled per survey, dependent on aircraft availability and weather windows |
| Cost | Priced per km², so it scales well across large or repeat-monitored areas | Mobilisation cost per sortie, which can work out cheaper for one small site |
| Best use | Large sites, nationwide portfolios, repeat change detection, and hard-to-reach locations | Maximum detail on a single, accessible site where sub-10cm resolution is essential |
Search any UK site on the map above for an instant archive price, or send us the area and we will come back with confirmed coverage and pricing, usually within one business day.
England spans from the dense streets of Greater London to the industrial Midlands, the arable belt of East Anglia, and a long southern coastline. Commercial imagery resolves individual streets and buildings across London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Bristol, while free archive data is enough to track farmland, woodland, and coastal change across the wider English countryside. The Sentinel-2 image below shows Greater London and the River Thames winding through the capital.
Scotland's satellite coverage runs from Edinburgh and Glasgow's Central Belt to the Scottish Highlands, Loch Ness, and the remote island groups of Orkney and Shetland. The contrast between Scotland's dense central cities and its sparsely populated north shows up clearly even in free-resolution imagery, and commercial imagery adds building-level detail for Scottish infrastructure and land projects. The Sentinel-2 image below shows Edinburgh on the south shore of the Firth of Forth.
Wales's satellite coverage runs from Cardiff and Swansea on the south coast, up through the Brecon Beacons, and into the mountains and lakes of Snowdonia (Eryri) National Park in the north. Commercial imagery, including the New Radnor sample shown further up this page, resolves individual houses and field boundaries in Welsh towns and villages, while free archive imagery works well for tracking upland land cover and the length of the Welsh coastline. The Sentinel-2 image below shows the Snowdonia (Eryri) mountains and lakes.
Northern Ireland's satellite imagery covers Belfast and Belfast Lough, the Causeway Coast, and a rural landscape of small fields and drumlin hills around Lough Neagh, the largest lake in the UK. Commercial imagery resolves Belfast's docks, shipyards, and street grid in building-level detail, while free imagery works well for tracking land-cover change across Northern Ireland's farmland and coastline. The Sentinel-2 image below shows Belfast on Belfast Lough, with Lough Neagh visible to the west.
Alongside the international free archives already covered on this page, Sentinel-2, Landsat, and NASA/NOAA's MODIS and VIIRS instruments, the United Kingdom also runs its own national platforms for free geospatial and aerial mapping data. These British government sources won't replace a genuine high-resolution satellite image of the UK, but they're a useful complement for anyone who also needs authoritative basemap, elevation, or environmental data layered underneath the imagery.
Ordnance Survey is Great Britain's national mapping agency, and its OS Open Data programme is the best-known free source of British map data, though it's worth knowing upfront that OS's sharpest aerial photography, the 25cm OS MasterMap Imagery Layer, is a separate licensed product rather than part of the free tier. What OS Open Data does provide at no cost is authoritative vector and terrain data covering all of England, Scotland, and Wales, the kind of basemap layer that pairs naturally underneath the satellite imagery on this page.
The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) operates a Data Services Platform that hosts England's national LIDAR archive alongside a wide range of environmental and agricultural datasets, some of them cross-referenced against Copernicus Sentinel data. It's one of the most useful free sources for anyone working on English flood risk, land use, or agricultural land, going a step further than raw satellite imagery alone.
Scotland's Spatial Data is the Scottish Government's own geospatial portal, and it fills a gap the England-focused sources above leave open, dedicated aerial photography and mapping data for Scotland specifically, rather than Great Britain as a whole.
High-resolution satellite images and maps of the UK are available from multiple commercial constellations and free public archives, so coverage isn't limited to a single sensor or a single date. Our satellite imagery coverage extends across every nation and region of the UK, from Greater London, the South East, and the South West of England, through the Midlands and the North of England, up into Scotland's Central Belt and Highlands, across Wales and Northern Ireland, and out to island groups such as the Isle of Wight, the Hebrides, Orkney, and Shetland. Whether your area of interest is a single building in central London, a farm in East Anglia, or the full coastline of Great Britain, the same search and tasking tools on this page work anywhere in the UK.
A satellite image of Great Britain shifts from dense capital-city streets to open farmland, mountains, and a heavily indented coastline within a few hundred miles. These places are all distinguishable in high-resolution satellite images of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
The Palace of Westminster, Big Ben, and the London Eye sit on opposite banks of a sharp bend in the Thames, one of the most recognisable shapes in any satellite image of London. At 25cm to 50cm the building footprints and the bridges between them are individually resolved.
The palace's formal quadrangle and gardens stand out as a block of structured green against the surrounding street grid. St James's Park, Green Park, and Hyde Park trace a continuous band of parkland west across the city centre.
The Tower's concentric walls sit on the north bank of the Thames beside the twin towers of Tower Bridge. The contrast between the medieval footprint and the modern City towers immediately north of it is clear at commercial resolution.
The castle occupies a volcanic crag above Scotland's capital, with the Royal Mile running east from it down the spine of the Old Town. The surrounding ridge-and-valley street pattern is distinctive even in mid-resolution imagery.
The chalk cliffs form a bright, continuous line along the Kent coast facing France across the English Channel. The Port of Dover and its breakwaters sit directly below them and are clearly resolved at sub-meter detail.
The prehistoric stone circle sits on open chalk grassland on the Wiltshire plain, with its surrounding earthwork ditch visible as a ring. Its isolation from surrounding development makes it unusually easy to pick out, even at moderate resolution.
The redeveloped waterfront at the heart of the Welsh capital is enclosed by the Cardiff Bay Barrage, which separates the freshwater bay from the Severn Estuary. The barrage line and the marina basins behind it are both clearly defined from above.
Belfast Harbour sits at the head of Belfast Lough, with the slipways and dry dock where the Titanic was built still visible in the Titanic Quarter. The Harland and Wolff gantry cranes and the surrounding shipyard layout are resolved in commercial imagery.
Satellite imagery of the UK supports work across a country that mixes dense cities, a long, flood-prone coastline, and one of the world's largest offshore wind sectors:
One search on this page covers commercial constellations and free public archives together. Which one you want comes down to how much detail the job actually needs, and how much of the UK you need to cover.
These are the paid constellations you can search and task directly through the portal above, and the only ones that resolve individual buildings and vehicles.
Free sources cost nothing and cover the whole country, but none of them resolve a single building. They suit land-cover, coastline, and regional change work.
UK imagery is priced per square kilometre by the resolution and capture mode you pick, so the practical question is how much detail the decision actually needs. Sub-meter commercial imagery is where most business use starts; free archive data handles everything broader than a single site.
Optical satellites need a clear sky. Radar does not. This matters more in Britain than in almost any other country covered on this site, and it is the single most common reason a UK capture slips.
| Resolution | Source | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| 25cm–50cm panchromatic | 21AT / SuperView Neo (commercial) | Individual buildings, vehicles, and infrastructure |
| 1.2m multispectral | 21AT BJ-3 constellation (commercial) | Detailed site analysis with color/spectral data |
| Sub-meter to multi-meter | Gaofen satellites (archive) | Regional and national-scale mapping across the UK |
| 10m optical / 5–20m radar | Sentinel-2 & Sentinel-1, Copernicus (free) | Regional monitoring, cloud-piercing radar coverage |
| 30m multispectral | Landsat (free) | Long-term land-cover and coastline change |
| 250m–375m, daily | NOAA/NASA MODIS & VIIRS (free) | Whole-country daily true-color snapshots, as shown above |
| Vector & terrain data (25cm aerial imagery licensed separately) | Ordnance Survey Open Data (free) | Authoritative Great Britain basemap, boundaries, and elevation |
| 1m LIDAR, 25cm in select floodplain/urban blocks | DEFRA Data Services Platform (free) | English flood risk mapping and land-use data |
| 12.5cm–25cm aerial photography | Scotland's Spatial Data (free) | Scotland-specific aerial imagery and land cover mapping |
Optical satellites need clear skies. Radar sees through UK cloud.
There is no single satellite image of the UK that updates continuously. Different satellites capture different areas on different schedules, and cloud cover can prevent a usable optical capture on any given pass, so the most recent available image for a specific location depends on the satellite, sensor, acquisition date, and cloud conditions at the time. Archive search on the portal above shows the actual capture dates available for your exact area of interest, and new tasking can request a fresh pass within days.
| Source | Typical Resolution | Update Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Sentinel-2 (Copernicus) | 10m optical | Every 5 days |
| Sentinel-1 (Copernicus) | 5–20m radar | Every 6 days, unaffected by cloud |
| Landsat 8 & 9 | 30m multispectral | Every 8 days combined |
| NOAA/NASA MODIS & VIIRS | 250m–375m | Daily |
| Commercial optical (21AT, SuperView Neo) | 25cm–1.2m | New tasking within days, location dependent |
Free viewers show you the whole country. None of them sell you a fresh capture of your own site.
These are the free tools most people use to look at satellite imagery of the UK. They differ mainly in how sharp the imagery is and how often it is refreshed.
| Tool | Resolution | Update Speed | Cost | Best Use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer aerial basemap viewers | Down to ~15cm in UK cities (aerial, not satellite) | Patchy, often 1-3 years between refreshes | Free | Casual viewing and historical imagery sliders |
| Weather-focused satellite viewers | 10m Sentinel-2, plus daily 250m MODIS/VIIRS | Daily for the coarse layers, ~5 days for Sentinel-2 | Free | Watching weather, storms, and cloud cover over the UK |
| NASA Worldview | 250m-375m MODIS and VIIRS | Daily | Free | Whole-country daily snapshots and cloud-cover checks |
| Copernicus Browser | 10m Sentinel-2, 5-20m Sentinel-1 radar | Every 5 days optical, every 6 days radar | Free | Downloading real Sentinel scenes with band data for analysis |
| Versioned aerial basemap archives | ~30cm-1m (world imagery basemap) | Versioned archive, updated as the basemap changes | Free | Comparing how the basemap over a UK site has changed over time |
All five are genuinely useful for looking. None of them let you order a new capture or licence imagery for commercial use. If you need 25cm detail of a specific UK site, or a fresh pass on a date you choose, search your area on the map above instead.
Free imagery shows the whole country. Commercial imagery shows single buildings.
| Free Public Imagery | Commercial Imagery | |
|---|---|---|
| Example | Sentinel-2, Landsat, NOAA/NASA VIIRS | SuperView Neo, 21AT |
| Resolution | 10m to 375m | 25cm to 1.2m |
| Cost | Free | Paid, priced by area and resolution |
| Best for | Regional and whole-country monitoring | Site-level detail and mapping |
| Buildings | Not distinguishable at 10m or coarser | Clearly resolved |
| Vehicles | Not distinguishable | Distinguishable at sub-meter resolution |
| New tasking | Not available | Available, new capture within days |
