Highest res Earth texture?

[Size_Mick]

What Earth texture or pic or whatever offers the highest resolution available? I mean any pic, not necessarily converted for use with Celestia. It seems that no matter what pre-made Earth texture I download for Celestia, I find myself disappointed with its resolution. Is there a super-mega-highres Earth texture out there somewhere that will make my computer beg for mercy? I'll worry about the conversion problems after I find the texture. TIA

P.S. toofri, I did download the earth-clouds.png and it does look fabulous! Great job!

[Smirnov]

Might want to try this one out:

ftp://ftp.dasmirnov.net/astronomy/celes ... 6k_dds.zip

Very sharp until you start getting below 1000Kms, still looks good down to about 400Kms though.

[Sum0]

And of course, there's the huge Blue Marble textures going up to 200k by 100k or something, with 1km/pixel... Though I doubt that would work well in Celestia.

[Ortolan]

And of course, there's the huge Blue Marble textures going up to 200k by 100k or something, with 1km/pixel... Though I doubt that would work well in Celestia

You could make a 32x16k texture from this and compress it with DXT1, I think it would be 340MB or 450MB with a specular mask if my math is correct. This would probably run fine on the new 512MB consumer-level graphics cards that are supposedly being released soon. It'd be quite a while before we can run 64x32k textures (2GB 3D cards ) but at those sort of scales it'd probably be better to break the textures into segments or something...

[dreamer]

MHO:
Ever heard the term "MipMapping"? That's what you'll need here - enhanced by the concept of using only a subset - the visible part - of the textures. Yes, that would require some serious 3D programming beyond the use of textured, bumpmapped spheres, but it should provide a solution to the large textures problem.
Uploading texture bits into graphics memory would have to be a background task and you would not be able (nor supposed to) resample the texture every frame, but since you cannot close in on surfaces very quickly anyway, that should not be a problem.

[Redfish]

Well if we move to 64k maps or higher, how long will it take before you can zoom in until you can see yerself sitting at the pc? :P

[Paul]

One thing people might not realise about the earth16k texture that Smirnov posted:

Although the DDS texture file is over 87meg in size (when unzipped), it will still run on some 64meg gfx cards (I'm using a 64Mb GeForce3), and it looks arbitrarily better than the 8k version! Well worth the download (zip file is 26.5Mb).

[Rassilon]

Well if we move to 64k maps or higher, how long will it take before you can zoom in until you can see yerself sitting at the pc?

A server mainframe with one of those video cards you never see at the local computer shop...

And a rendered model of the planet lol

[Size_Mick]

Okay I am using earth16k.dds now and it looks waaaay better than any of the textures I've used previously (except for the specular lighting is reflecting off land masses). Well, I'd still like a better quality texture. One of the things that somewhat annoys me about this one is that it appears to be heavily retouched. Assuming this was made from day-side satellite color photos or something, I have to wonder where all of the cities are. I have to assume that urban sprawl has reached a point where it is easily seen from space. Is there any texture like the earth16k.dds that is raw and unmodified, even if the satellite photos that are used don't fit together seamlessly? Maybe I ask for way too much. What I really want is probably not even available to the general public. Eh.

I was wondering about the feasibility of making a "political map overlay" texture, possibly one that could replace "night side lights" and would basically just be thin white lines that show the borders of countries and states? I realize this is going way off the subject matter that Celestia was designed to deal with, but when I look at this earth16k.dds texture and all of its topographical detail, I would like some sort of reference to know exactly what and where I'm looking at. It'd be handier than trying to find my atlas :) Oh well, forget I mentioned it.

[Sum0]

Also, what are the highest res night and cloud maps?

[Ortolan]

Also, what are the highest res night and cloud maps?

For some reason there is no discernable difference in cloud quality above 2048x1024 pixels. As for the night side texture, I have a 32x16k one (too big for me to even use) made from a GIF at NASA's Visible Earth website, that's the biggest one I know of.