21600x10800 Earth texture from NASA's "Visible Earth"

[Paul]

Well, I'd love to say that I have this texture available, but I don't...

If you don't know what it is, go here:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/

Basically, they say to email them if you want the very-high-res version, which is 21600 by 10800 pixels (yum!). Unfortunately, although I emailed them a few weeks ago, I've had no response.

I just wanted to know whether anyone's had any luck obtaining this 21600x10800 image - mainly so I could (if possible) obtain a more reasonably sized JPEG (theirs is a 170MB TIFF!), or at least get some idea of whether they're snowed under with requests, and simply take a long time (possibly never?).

[Guest]

Same experience as Paul got : No answer from that nasa site. Other experinence welcomed as e.g. US citizen.
MB

[Buzz]

I asked them for it too without getting an answer. However, I did get an answer with a link to a page with some sample images from it at the 1 km resolution that I will post when I found it at home :D

[chris]

I haven't been able to get it either . . . When I do, I want to make a 16384x8192 version of it. Using DXT1 texture compression, I can shrink this down to 80MB, which is small enough to use with a 128MB card.

--Chris

[Guest]

err... I went into the site, and saw the available downloads (res up to 8000 something) but you said that the 21600 was only available on request... i never saw any of that.. did i get the wrong site, because i found an ftp were the 21600 was available for download...

ftp://gloria2-f.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/stockli/

i found the link on the page:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/

on the link "Source files and technical details (ftp)"
i CAN download the file, 21600x21600 on 200+ mb however since i have a 56k i don't want to do that(if you don't understand why i don't want to download it, please go and jump of nearest bridge).
I wish i had broadband....

hope you guys can download it

[Guest]

Actually, isn't it 21600x43200?

The ftp site appears to have the eastern and western hemispheres in separate pieces, each 21600x21600. Here are a couple of the files from the directory listing:


MOD09A1.E.interpol.cyl.retouched.3x21600x21600.gz 477596860


MOD09A1.W.interpol.cyl.retouched.3x21600x21600.gz 286522043



Note the (compressed) sizes in bytes. Wow! The western hemisphere apparently compresses well because of the oceans, but that's still a lot of data. These files are for the flat version; the versions with topography and bathymetry are even larger.

- Hank

[Guest]

OK, sorry bout that
i didn't examine so closely, makes me feel real bad to see large files when i only have a 56k modem *running to bedroom crying out loud*

Anyway, i wonder if it is even possible to load that picture on a regular PC...

Hey what a conincidence, my name's also hank, or nickname that is.

[Kurt G?del]

Well, i emailed them when i saw the story on slashdot and a wee later they sent me the URL, here's the juicy part of the message:


Hi-

Sorry about the inconvenience. The load on the server proved to be too
heavy - so we had to remove the direct links to the files.

You can download the file(s) you requested at the following address:

ftp://visibleearth.nasa.gov/pub/EARTHVIZ/

filename: land_shallow_topo_east.tif.gz
land_shallow_topo_west.tif.gz
land_shallow_topo_21600.tif.gz

Please download thesefiles only if you have access to a fast internet
connection (cable modem, DSL, T1, etc). There is high demand for these
images and this has put a significant strain on the server.

Thanks for your interest in the Earth Observtory!


Already downloaded the big west+east pictures, now i'm looking for a computer with 1GB RAM to combine and process them

[Mikeydude750]

What would happen if I used the 80 MB texture with my 32 MB card?

[dab]

>>You can download the file(s) you requested at the following address:
>> ftp://visibleearth.nasa.gov/pub/EARTHVIZ/

well, I downloaded the images from there, and, since I don't
have the
hardware to view them in their entirety, I have been using
convert -crop ...
to chop them into small pieces (200 18deg x 18deg files, that is)

now, both hemisphere images seem to go only until approx. 20deg
S latitude (y-coord 13000, roughly), south of that, there is only
blackness.

I'd like to hear if the images are indeed damaged or if maybe this is a
problem of convert refusing to deal with images that size... have you
succeeded in viewing the entire image? places south of, say, 30S? how did
you handle the file?

cheers,

dab

[chris]

What would happen if I used the 80 MB texture with my 32 MB card?

It would be bad.

Actually, your OpenGL driver would either resize the texture to a size that fits, or more likely would just skip the texture completely.

--Chris

[Mikeydude750]

What would happen if I used the 80 MB texture with my 32 MB card?

It would be bad.

Actually, your OpenGL driver would either resize the texture to a size that fits, or more likely would just skip the texture completely.

--Chris

Ah. BTW, is there a 64 MB PCI card out there? Because my computer came with that s****y Integrated AGP, and I don't have an AGP slot because of it. Whoever invented that integrated stuff should have been imprisoned.

[Mikeydude750]

Chris, is there any way can you split textures into smaller textures that my graphics card can handle. And have Celestia use?

[Kurt G?del]

now, both hemisphere images seem to go only until approx. 20deg
S latitude (y-coord 13000, roughly), south of that, there is only
blackness.

I haven't been able to view the images yet (even convert -crop exhausted my Linux box memory and swap ), but since the downscaled versions of those images seem to be complete i guess you're having problems either with convert or damaged files. Take a look at downscaled versions:

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?11656

[Buzz]

dab wrote: now, both hemisphere images seem to go only until approx. 20deg
S latitude (y-coord 13000, roughly), south of that, there is only
blackness.

I have used Photoshop on windows to view the big tifs now that I was allowed to download them. They seem to be complete at first sight. (It takes _a lot_ of time to load btw...)

As promised earlier: the link with samples of these 1km resolution images:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsro ... oseup.html

[Ortolan]

Chris, is there any way can you split textures into smaller textures that my graphics card can handle. And have Celestia use?

I was just thinking that too. It must be possible for Celestia to load small high resolution tiles for only the area currently visible. eg: You approach the Earth to a point where you can see 100km x 100km of planet surface. At this point, Celestia loads a table of 25 1024x1024px (@1pixel = ~50m) images covering the visible area plus a buffer around the edge. There'd have to be some code restricting movement so that you couldn't pan to another area quickly before the necessary tiles had been loaded into memory. If a high-resolution tile does not exist for an area, Celestia could just scale up the pixels of the previous texture as it currently does. Of course, this might be incredibly difficult to implement (I have barely any programming experience beyond "Hello World!" so I don't know : ) but it would definately be a Damn Cool Thing(TM).

[Mikeydude750]

Sounds good, because my graphics card sucks on ice. Once I get my new computer, hello GeForce 4!

[clem]

Hello!
I have downloaded both 21K map (east:400Mb and west:240MB from ftp://visibleearth.nasa.gov/pub/EARTHVIZ/ but I can't open these files. When I try to open it with Photoshop 6 : Cannot open file "..._east.tif" because it is not a TIFF file.
help!

clem

[clem]

Hi!
I have downloaded both hires earth map (east of 400Mb and west of 240Mb) but when i try to open these files with Photoshop 6 : "cannot open file () because it is not tiff file."
All softwares of my own have the same problem (Paintshoppro, Imaging...) although i can open some other .tif pictures.
Maybe it is LZW compression that i can't open?...

I have :
Athlon 1600XP+
512 Mb RAM
64 Mb video
windows 98 and XP

clem

[Guest]

clem:

I downloaded the images from another part of Nasa's FTP and those were GZip'ed RAW images... They loaded perfectly into PSP7 when loaded as RAW, 24-bit color interleaved RGB. Note that PSP won't let you use images larger than 32768 pixels wide/high, so merging them is not an option.

Don't know about the ones you downloaded, but you cound try as above to see if it works...

/ Lars