Celestia Forums

I found this open source program for viewing the huge blue marble textures. I havent tried it yet as i have a 56k connection. Maybe someone with a fast connection could check it out. You seem to have to download the texture again split into manageable 2k sizes. The program uses paging to load each bit as you need it.

Address http://www.andesengineering.com/BlueMar ... ble_Viewer

It would be very interesting to see something like this in Celestia. If nothing else, the data files available from this site could be useful.

The program supports a maximum resolution of 40,960 x 20,480 pixels based on the original Blue Marble dataset. The data is supplied as a set of files for 256x256 5:5:1 pixel tiles for five resolution levels. At the lowest resolution (2560x1280) there are 10x5 (50) tiles. It's about 285 MB to download all the data (.tar.gz), and it expands to over 2 GB when extracted.

The source code is also available, and perhaps could be adapted for use in Celestia.

Also, the open source scene graph library used by this program looks interesting.

- Hank

This project is recieving some support from the NASA LTP Project. The idea is to use this technology to view data sets on planets. It shares some features with Celestia - (uses open source software, and texture maps), but is different in many important respects. It can seemlessly examine a large texture (The Earth data set is a 1km resolution Earth, where as Celestia uses a 3km resolution). The program uses a paging algorithym to page data in and out. The development is going in the direction of overlaying animated data sets over the base texture maps.
The Base Data for the earth texture uncompresses to about 2gig.

It would be great if the open source community would add to the effort. The NASA perspective for Learning Technology is to have the programs work seemlessly together.