earth map resources

the following resources are heavily based on Robert Hodgin’s findings for his earthquake visualizations documented on flickr.

1 visible earth, blue marble, a catalogue of NASA images and animations of our planet. Image resources include land surface, clouds, city lights, raw bathymetry, raw topography. Image size ranges from thumbnails, 5400x2700, 21600x10800 up to 86400x43200 pixels.

2 Natural Earth, a collection of maps including clouds, elevation bump, masks (such as boundaries, cities, sea ice and water), textures of the earth, without cloud, no ice, at night. Maps do include rivers. Image size ranges from 8192x4096 to 16200x8100,  directory listing with all the files.

3 earth texture maps include natural colors, atmospherical, coulds, elevation and bump map, water and land mask, night. in addition there are maps for moon, venus, mars and a stars map. Image size is 2500x1250 pixels.

4 how to texture a globe in processing.

NASA - ASTER

“NASA and Japan released a new digital topographic map of Earth Monday that covers more of our planet than ever before. The map was produced with detailed measurements from NASA’s Terra spacecraft.

The new global digital elevation model of Earth was created from nearly 1.3 million individual stereo-pair images collected by the Japanese Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, or Aster, instrument aboard Terra.”
image: Himalayan glaciers in Bhutan. download the Aster global digital elevation model at Aster G-DEM