I didn't mean to slight your work in the least - my understanding from
the text I read on your site was that RE was based on the SG Render
Earth (which, AFAIK, is at ~10.5k), and that you had patched it with
the ocean from your 32k Earth in progress.
The main reason I did mine is that my favorite of the lot, SGs Render
Earth, was only 10.5k, and had the poor sea-ice, land-sea interface,
and cloud/masking of any texture based directly off Reto Stockli's BM.
But going directly to Reto's sources you can more or less fix everything.
In truth, NONE of the earth textures are particularly realistic - reviewing
the Apollo film/TV coverage from outside of LEO, the best rendition so
far is that done by ARC Science for their rather expensive "Face of the
Earth" texture (
http://www.arcscience.com/face.htm) - I
found some pallette manipulations that tranformed Blue Marble close
to this, but my target audience (Orbiter users) kvetched that it was too
desaturated. So my version is a compromise between Face of the Earth
and the Shuttle photography in the books "The Home Planet" and
"Orbit" - which is ALSO color adjusted (as all film product is) to better
match expectations. Then there's the issues of older film pigments saturating/decaying at different rates, etc.
The MODIS images BM is based on are 'color-corrected' to remove Raleigh scattering - I think 1) they over adjust, and 2) there doesn't appear to be very good realtime atmospheric haze rendering in either
simulator. So you pick some point on the curve (view from surface -> view from high-orbit) to use.
