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
Slashdot Saturn later!
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)!
Reminds me of this great picture I was emailed a few years back http://www.flickr.com/photos/mmkempe/52260470/
KeepTrackOfIt.com - Find the lowest gas prices in your area graphically
I set up a 386 to mirror the 22 gigs of data with my 56k modem connection right here. Not too many at once, please
JPEG and many other file formats are limited to 65,535 pixels in any given dimension. The largest image in this dataset is 86,400 x 43,200. What file format are they going to use?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Those of us true uber-geeks have IPv6, where localhost is ::1.
So ha!
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.
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
We've /.ed an entire planet.
Windows Tweaks
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
Since the given mirrors are slashdotted, here's the obligatory corel cache link:
w sroom/BlueMarble/
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov.nyud.net:8090/Ne
How could someone post a giant, hires image of the earth and NOT post an obligatory pov-ray "Earth marble" in space?!
// GENERATE WITH
// povray +W640 +H480 +A0.3 -J +Q11 +R6
#include "textures.inc"
camera {location 8 look_at 0}
light_source { -50 color rgb 1 }
light_source { 50 color rgb 1 }
sphere
{ 0, 4.5 pigment {image_map {
jpeg "world.topo.bathy.200405.3x5400x2700.jpg"
map_type 1 interpolate 2 } }
finish {ambient 0.4 diffuse 1 specular 0} }
sphere {
0,1 texture { Starfield scale 1} scale 200
no_shadow hollow on }
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.
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
Let see
5% > 1%
50% > 1%
99% > 15
Works for me.
If > and confuse you just remember:
the alligator is hungry so the mouth opens towards the bigger meal.
ACMD eht detaloiv evah uoy
Umm the images clearly show that the world is in fact flat. These new fangled "globes" that you see in places of "science" actually compress the north and south edges of the world in order to fit the world map on a sphere.
Dude, this is Slashdot. We're going to parse the URL list using a Perl script and then run wget -i on the resulting output, saving the files to the directory /usr/share/marble and using chmod to set appropriate permissions for our machine's users.
Right click save as. Pfft.
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.
the subject read my mind
http://download.worldwindcentral.com/Blue_Marble_N G.kmz