It's the landcover map from the Blue Marble source files FTP.
I used it for my texture as well. Hawaii and all deep atlantic/pacific/indian ocean islands are missing, because it was generated from the monthly 500m MODIS land albedo updates, which only cover the major continents and Indonesia.
A shame SG didn't bother fixing the problems.
You could make your own pretty easily with NetPBM and a little bit of Photoshopping like this:
1) Take an original color BM color texture (NOT THE ONE WITH THE CHLOROPHYLL TINTED OCEANS) in the desired size
2) Convert to 3 greyscales for the three color channels
3) Subtract the blue channel from the green channel.
4) Threshold the color curve of the resultant <green-blue> map, with every value 10 and below mapped to black, and every value 11 and above mapped to white. This gets all islands save one in you want in the south Indian ocean, while excluding all reefs.
5) Threshold the red channel, so that every value 36 and below is mapped to black, and every value and above is mapped to ice - this captures the sea ice and the one or two glaciated islands in the South Indian.
6) Add the results from steps 4 and 5 together. This merges the sea ice and island sets, but unfortunately blankets the continents with opaque/non-specular white.
7) Take the product of 6, go into Photoshop/Gimp, and erase (paint black) every continent except Antarctica, Indonesia and all islands within 5-10 pixels, which is the specular cover of the landcover map. Use your better judgement around Canada and Siberia, where the sea ice touches the land - probably better to just leave a slight overlap of the sea ice onto land here.
You now have a spec map with all deep sea islands and sea ice that should be rendered at your desired resolution. The thresholds in 4/5 are the ones I determined empirically from the default BM, but if you keep both original and the color separations open you can look at details to make sure the mapping looks right.
Except for part 7, theres little here that requires human intervention. So if you have scripting skills and Image Magick, you could easily do a 32k or upsampled 64k island/sea-ice spec map
8) Now, download the two landcover maps at Visible Earth Blue Marble sources FTP: [url]ftp://mitch.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/stockli/bluemarble/
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9) Convert from 16-bit raw to your working image format.
10) Merge hemispheres.
11) Threshold value 0 to 0, and everything 1 and above (though it maxes at 15) to white.
12) Scale to your desired resolution.
13) Remap, so that all greys that might result from mixing during scaling are dithered to black or white. Using the NetPBM pnmremap with a two pixel .ppm mapfile (black and white) does this quite handily.
You now have a pixel perfect version of the landcover spec map at any desired resolution.
14) Add the products of 7 and 13, and you now have a specular map with all the the islands, sea-ice, and continental landcover in in whatever resolution you desire.
I've done this for you in 16 k, presented it a .png so further mods are easy, but note, the sea-ice present is based on merged MODIS sea ice cover masks, and not on the default blue marble color texture:
Right click to download - its only 745 kb for a map 4 times the size of SGs. He probably forgot to remap to just two colors, or is using the much less efficient .tiff compression, or something.
http://laika.012webpages.com/celestia/download/hp3.spec.16k.png
Named hp3 cause its from the 3rd public release of the home planet textures for the Orbiter simulator. Its a full 16k set that will be done in playable formats for Celestia real soon.
http://www.space-graphics.com/downloads/maps/e43/e43_mask_type2_8k.zip
) out. It's the same one that I use in my earth renders as well.
