Free High Res Images of Earth
If you desire high-resolution images of the Earth, the good folks at Unearthed Outdoors have made available the 250m True Marble image set for a free download with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. It's a map of the Earth made up of 32 tiles, where each tile is a 21,000 pixel square, available in png and tif formats. There's also a series of smaller files that may be more useful -- in case you don't need a map of the Earth that ends up being 84,000 pixels tall and 168,000 pixels across. Printed at 600 dpi, that's about 12 feet by 24 feet!
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Damn, there's a lot of desert.
The only reason I'd want to see that view of the planet is if I were leaving it forever.
168000 px / 40000 km = 4.2 px/km at the equator...
I don't think I could see my house in these.
And it's 14112 megapixels. I love where technology's gotten us.
Cool! And GeoTIFF-tagged, too. 250-meter resolution is no "I can see my house from here" but it's nice to see more of this information outside the Google/etc walled garden.
But where's Antarctica?
250 meter resolution is "I can see my house from here" if you've got a 672,745 square foot house. Ok, 15 acres could get pretty lonely, but it's all relative :-)
So...Candy Spelling can see her house.
My first impression was the #1 comment.
#3 answered my first question.
Well, that was easy!
Toodles!
If you're going to take on a project like this, why use such a shitty map?
The best one is Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map. It's the only one that shows all the continents without distortion and without cutting them up, especially Antarctica.
Check it out: http://tinyurl.com/DymaxionMap
I'm looking around, wondering if I have a 12'x32' wall and enough printer ink. And I'd bet I'm not the only one.
This is data repackaged from NASA's Visible Earth: Blue Marble.
I see huge possibilities for Wikipedia and other projects. While there is a lot of freely available GIS data already, the tools to use that are beyond most editors' abilities.
#9: You mean the Dymaxion (R) Fuller Projection (R) of spaceship earth (R)?
You sure that anyone else using it is even legal?
I like blue Marble's better.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BlueMarble/BlueMarble_monthlies.php
Author of the imagery here. I'd first like to say that this is our high res 15m resolution product rescaled to a lower 250m resolution. You won't have to too much further to find more info on the 15m, several terabyte, imagery.
When I produced this imagery set, 15m LandSat data wasn't available and high quality for Antarctica. I plan on including it in the next version, though.
That looks like a projection scheme. There are hundreds of those to choose from, so I chose a standard one. There are a number of utilities you can use to change between projections. See here for more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection
Nope, True Marble is higher resolution (250m) than that. It is similar, but completely our own. It is our high resolution imagery down sampled.
Is pretty awesome, actually. I can really appreciate this!!
UOSeth, just wondering if there is grayscale height data to match this great imagery?
Love the planet. Hate the people. It's lovely at this time of year though. E.T. children stay free. Mostly harmless.
Here's an idea of what the images look in little 500x500 crops:
Chicago: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3240/3159389974_55ef12e13d_o.jpg
NYC: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3215/3158556509_3d885660cf_o.jpg
Now this is cool. This is twice the resolution (or four times the number of pixels) that you can get from NASA's blue marble.
I can make good use of this in Microsoft's Flight Simulator ;)
# 16 A greyscale hillshade image is available over at Tom Pattersons's Natural Earth III website.
http://www.shadedrelief.com/natural3/index.html
Scale is more course than the True Marble images, this is offset by the hillshading.
The site has an impressive selection of texture mapping as well. (Clouds, earth at night etc.)
It evens includes Antarctica
Re: #16
The best global DEM I know of is here:
http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/
But I haven't looked around for a while.
Hangie & UOSeth
Great stuff, thanks!
Is there a world political map on this scale? or one with countries borders imposed?
The only political maps I can find are those four colour country ones with a resolution of about 1 pixel = wales
I got a real nice view of the earth from my window....niiice.
do the people working in various space platforms and vessels get time to surf the web?
check out their licensing and fees for the full resolution data:
http://www.unearthedoutdoors.net/global_data/true_marble/purchase
$25K for personal use of public domain data. Note that the US constitution mandates that the output of federal agencies be put into the public domain.
If you like this, there's a guy who makes free textures of the planets available:
Planet Texture Map Collection
I used his Mars texture for my Got Water? t-shirt:
Mars 'Got Water?' Design
#26: Also from the site:
" It was built from the best available Landsat scenes which have been chosen to optimize vegetation quality and to reduce the cloud cover. These orthorectified scenes were fed into proprietary, advanced, color adjustment algorithms to produce true color imagery while reducing atmospheric haze. This imagery was optimized to produce the most natural color while maintaining a high local contrast and dynamic range, resulting in a significant improvement over similar products. "
It was certainly built from PD Landsat data, which is PD as it was produced by NASA, a U.S. government agency. However, Unearthed Outdoors, who are not a U.S. government agency, put a lot of original work into selecting, compiling and tweaking that data together into a coherent product. That makes it a derivative work, and gives them the right to release it under whatever license they choose. They've been very generous and released the low-res version under a CC license.
Gratitude is in order, not derision.
On that note, Seth and Emily, thanks for making an awesome product, and for giving some of it away for free (and under a Wikipedia-compatible license, too!)
@#28
OK, I missed that they created it from Landsat. Agreed that it is nice of them to release a CC version of the data. However, their comparison between True Marble and Blue Marble is a bit misleading. The images from this page:
http://www.unearthedoutdoors.net/global_data/true_marble/compare
are based on the older Blue Marble data (the link to the image points to a very old application) and not the current Blue Marble Next Generation data.
#30: True enough. I hadn't seen that. Nevertheless, they still have a few advantages over the Blue Marble Next Generation: Their marble is 15m resolution, while the NASA one is still only 500m. They also have their fairly sophisticated colour enhancement. (I think their algorithm uses other data to inform its colour choice, e.g. height has an influence on shade.)
@ #5 re: Antarctica.
It's a projection for July 2013: iz melted.
=P
Re: #28 ("Gratitude is in order, not derision.")
Thanks! I've been traveling today, but I'm glad I am able to address everyone's concerns. It's a somewhat rare circumstance.
And you're right. On this project I spent about 90% of my time (many months) experimenting with different processing algorithms. Only 10% was spent actually producing this final output.
Re: #29 & #30 ("However, their comparison between True Marble and Blue Marble is a bit misleading.")
That's not a comparison between True Marble and Blue Marble (500m); it's a comparison between True Marble and the WMS Global Mosaic (pansharpened, channels 742, 15m). For an example of NASA's full dataset, see here:
http://onearth.jpl.nasa.gov/
http://onearth.jpl.nasa.gov/WK/
There is no updated version of the WMS Global Mosaic. In fact, their funding is so low they can't serve the raw GeoTIFFs anymore because they don't have funding to replace failed hard drives.
Also, if I was using Blue Marble for the example, the high res image below would be unrecognizable at 500m resolution.
Perhaps I should update the page to be more clear?
Lovely, thanks!!! - have downloaded all the 250m data, and squirreled it away for a rainy day (eg next time I have to do shots of Earth from orbit - now, where can I get might enough res cloud maps?)
Let's hope (for your sake) I find I actually need the higher res material that has to be paid for! ;)
no criticism of this lovely stuff, but re projections - everyone should have a Gall-Peters projection map around the house, it distorts the shapes of the continents somewhat, but preserves the relative areas. It puts tiny little countries like the UK in their (our) place.
@ #5 re: Antarctica.
Whilst not included in this data, the recently released LIMA (Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica) image is available at http:\\lima.usgs.gov.
It also involved significant effort "into selecting, compiling and tweaking that data together into a coherent product", including much work to cope with enhancing details in the snow and ice. So in fact LIMA is a true surface reflectance product. And free at 15 metres resolution to boot.
Sahara runs all the way to Manchuria. The area it covers is bigger than nearly all the continents on the planet. Only Asia is bigger.
Sign-in was 404. This is esperanto41 responding to comment #9:
Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map is NOT "the only one that shows all the continents without distortion and without cutting them up":
B.J.S. Cahill designed a far more elegant octahedral world map in 1909 that accomplished all that, more than three decades before Fuller. See my detailed and profusely illustrated comparison/critique of the Fuller and Cahill maps at
http://www.genekeyes.com/FULLER/BF-1-intro.html