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)!
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.
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
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.