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

[Guest]

ERmapper gives a distorted view of the earth ... ie typically a mercator style projection if you are using the blue marble image. Celestia shows true areas as image is drapped over a 3D sphere

Obvious, since BlueMarble image is a "distorted" mercator style projection.

I'm not comparing Celestia to ER Viewer in any way. I'm only suggesting ER Mapper to show the BlueMarble image as is, because it is a simple image browser, and not a projection utility. You'll get the same "distorted" view using GIMP, PSP or PhotoShop.

Of course, ER Viewer hasn't editing capabilities like these, but you won't have to wait up to 45 minutes for the 400 MB image to load, if you simply want to have a look at it. It seems that some people (jliechty, john Van Vliet) is experiencing trouble in loading the pic.

[Pollux]

Last message was mine. Sorry.
Pollux.

[Guest]

I agree totally pollux, ermapper/viewer is a fantastic product for viewing large graphics files. In fact I have raised this before in the celestia forums as a possible path to displaying higher res images. In many ways the new virtual textures mimic some of the features of ermapper. ie. The image is broken down into manageable tiles so that only those needed are loaded and the resolution is increased as the observer gets closer and the number of tiles decreases. That said I think ermapper does it all in a more cleaver way. For a start ermapper compresses images to a fraction of their size, secondly ermapper only stores a single image for all resolutions and thirdly it increases the resolution smoothly as you zoom in instead of in discreet steps. What ermapper does not do is wrap the image around a sphere.

ron

[MindToAsk]

There's a new texture (.dds) available on http://www.marfig.com/celestia/ (-> 90MB aprox. 7hrs with a dial-up connection)