Celestia Forums

the tool is "Blue Marble Viewer".
http://www.andesengineering.com/BlueMarbleViewer/

Celestia can use virtual texture. Do this tool use the same way ?

Have you already talk about it on the forum ?

The "Blue Marble Viewer" was one of the other projects (in addition to Celestia) that the NASA Learning Technologies group using. Unfortunately, when the funding for NASA LTP had problems, the BMV project was put on a "back burner" by its author in June, 2003. See http://dburns.dhs.org/pipermail/bmv-announce/2003-June/000002.html

Celestia always has been freeware, so NASA funding didn't matter. "Virtual textures" appeared in Celestia v1.3.1pre9, which was released in August, 2003. See http://63.224.48.65/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3041

Chris has never mentioned any relationship between the two projects.

As best I can tell, the datasets and the methods used to load and display the surface textures are quite different. BMV supports atmospheric animations, for example. Celestia does not.