Slashdot Mirror
NASA BlueMarble: Next Generation
gbnewby writes "Remember the NASA Blue Marble composite image of earth from space, completely cloud free? Today a whole new series was released showing earth scenes from cloudless days across all 12 months of 2004. These beautiful images come in many different resolutions and formats. NASA even provided some animations. We and others have set up web, ftp and rsync mirrors; let the Torrents begin!"
The best way to enjoy NASA's blue marble is through Celestia.
here
I suggest a right-click of mouse and then Save As in the browser to save the above-linked images.
The files are huge and may be Slashdotted soon as well.
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
The creators call Celestia a "free space simulation" that lets you explore the Universe in 3D.
It runs on all platforms including my favourite, Linux.
"Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit. Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects."
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
NASA's open source world viewer project World Wind will have support for next generation Blue Marble on the 20th. In fact developers today got the beta xml with coverage of all thirty six new blue marble layers.
The previous max res was split into 2 files that you could bring together. One JPEG for the western hemisphere, one for the eastern.
Yup, our server is having issues. Now I'm going to have to spend tomorrow pulling all the 5400 by 2700 and 21600 by 10800 pixel links off ...
r ble.html has small samples.
In the meantime, http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/features/blue_ma
I forgot to mention in the posting: there are several neat :(
fly-over navigation programs that can use these images. One
with a tie to the U. Alaska is EarthSLOT.
The mirror links include an "earthslot" subdirectory, where
ready-made flyover files are available. Unfortunately,
EarthSLOT is Windows-centric
For the geeks: Yes, I'm tuning the Apache server a bit during the /.'ing. Sorry for people who get dropped connections while I do this. I decided to upgrade to the Apache 2.1.8 beta for large file support & a few other features. The server is from ASA Servers, and has three 1.7TB SATA RAID arrays on Western Digital 250GB drives, with dual 2.8Ghz Xeon processors and 12GB of RAM. It's running SuSE 9.1. I put the FTP copy (vsftpd) on one array, and the http + rsync copy on another array. This is a pretty hefty server, but I've been changing tuning (xinetd, vsftpd, httpd and some kernel stuff) in response to traffic to try to keep it handling things. It's lots of fun, and reminds me of my close days with iBiblio, which was a frequent slashdot target.
Photoshop: Open As, Raw, select the file, fill in the X and Y dimensions. Number of channels is 3, 0 bytes header. I haven't been able to get one of the files yet, so I can't tell you if you need to turn on interleaved or not, but I suspect you will want interleaved.
We (3D Nature) packaged up the old BlueMarble data, along with 1Km terrain data for the whole earth (GTOPO30) on a product called Ultimate Earth for our landscape visualization software, Visual Nature Studio. It's pretty cool to be able to pull up an area, add your own data to what we provide, and have a ready-made planet visualization.
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
I work in the vis studio that produced the animations and I can tell you that file formats are a big problem with images this size. We usually work in TIFF, and while the TIFF format has no specific resolution limits, it is effectively limited to 4GB per image due to the use of internal 32-bit offsets. The full Blue Marble NG data sets simply don't fit in common image formats. Work is being done on a "big TIFF" spec that includes 64-bit offsets and other improvements that will accomodate much larger images.
Jim Williams
Assuming there is or will be a 86400x43200 TIF of JPEG file, you can use a TFW of JFW file that reads like this in your favorite GIS app:
:)
0.00416666666666
0.00000000000000
0.00000000000000
-0.00416666666666
-180.00000000000000
90.00000000000000
I've got a bundle of these from the last Blue Marble at this page.
I do work for Mud Springs Geographers, which have an app called AWhere that support loading this sort of image as a map layer. I'm not into crass commercialism, but unfortunately, Slashdot won't let me post just that TFW because of the lameness filter. You'd think they would make excpetions for anciend user ids or excellent karma, but no.....
(Okay, I've removed the whitespace from the snippet above, but keep in mind that most TFW files have the decimal point positioned 20 spaces from the left edge.)
Anyway, thanks for making this available and for all the bandwidth :)
Get the addon here. It is only 160KB as all data is downloaded on demand.
http://download.worldwindcentral.com/Blue_Marble_N G.kmz