Whole-Earth Images

• it is very labor-intensive to create a cloud-free visible-light image of the entire surface of the earth
• it is also complicated to apply a texture evenly to a sphere

Free Images

• NASA Blue Marble Next Generation (BMNG)
  • a 500m global image composited from the MODIS satellite, collected 2004
  • radically better than the previous Blue Marble dataset
  • available in three versions (plain, with topography, with topography and bathymetry)
  • and in 12 months (January through December) showing seasonal color variation
  • main download link for BMNG on the Visible Earth site

• NASA Blue Marble (2002)
  • a 1km global image composited from the MODIS and AVHRR satellites, collected June through September 2001
  • image quality is very good, although there are some traces of clouds
  • Blue Marble: Land Surface, Shallow Water, and Shaded Topography
  • Blue Marble: Land Surface, Ocean Color and Sea Ice (up to 5km)
  • Blue Marble: Land Surface, Ocean Color, Sea Ice and Clouds (up to 5 km)
  • Earth's City Lights (up to 5 km)
  • as a Dymaxion projection image set for use with Enviro Earth View:
    • Tile size: 1024 (1.6MB), 2048 (2.5MB)

• NASA Earth at Night 2012, also known as the "Black Marble"
  • a 750m global image (1/3 the resolution of latest Blue Marble), compositing a few days in April and October 2012 to get night light coverage with minimal cloud interference.  A nice thing to use for drawing a partly illuminated view of the earth from space.  It isn't just cities; many of the brightest areas are oil fields.

• Unearthed Outdoors True Marble, free version
  • a 250m global image composited from LandSat7 (1999-2002)
  • color quality is good, although clouds are significant in LandSat's usual trouble spots
  • True Marble's commercial version is 15m (see below)

• J.Hasting's Planetary Image Maps: Earth
  • has a 10800*5400 (4km) image
  • also available in lower resolutions
  • though it's "fuzzy" and not very accurate, it is quite beautiful
  • also provides bump, specularity, and cloud maps
  • available as a Dymaxion projection image set for use with Enviro Earth View:
    • Tile size: 1024 (650k), 2048 (1.9MB)

• Dave Pape's Earth images has some public-domain images up to 4096x2048 in size
• XGlobe Maps has a rather nice 2000x1000 image
• flatplanet maps is a collection of links to most of the available free images

• if you'd like to try "cooking" your own visual whole-earth image from public data, the GLCF hosts global vegetation coverage (see Distribution of Plants on Terrain)

• A similar list of earth images is at Cylindrical Planetary Maps on the Internet

Commercial Images

• Earthstar Geographics TerraColor
  • 15 meter coverage for the entire earth.  They claim to be the only provider with complete coverage at 15m, including the areas outside the LandSat coverage area, by using supplemental data sources, including 15m for much of Antarctica.
  • It is ocean-masked, so it is "clean" with no clouds or image edges in the ocean areas.
  • 'Simulated true color' uses LandSat bands 7, 4, 2.
  • Licensing starts at $100 per 5x6 degree tile or $35,000 for the whole earth, less for region bundles.

• Unearthed Outdoors True Marble
  • 15 meter coverage for the entire earth, a 3 TB dataset
  • Costs as little as $15 for a 2x2 degree tile, up to $25k or more to license the whole earth.
  • Claims "best available Landsat scenes [..] fed into proprietary, advanced, color adjustment algorithms to produce true color imagery while reducing atmospheric haze."
  • By being true color, it compares favorably to NASA OnEarth global mosaic, which has the same resolution and source data, and some other commercial LandSat derivatives.

• TruEarth
  • 15 meter coverage for the entire earth
    • "substantially cloud free", usually shipped in UTM for small areas, Geographic for larger
  • 1 km image
    • claims to be "the first cloud-free global Earth image based on actual landcover coloring" - it looks very similar to the other earth images
    • they claim to have a more advanced process: "We are unique in that we actually have an image in our stack that classifies each pixel to a specific type of landcover (one of about 900 unique types across the Earth), not simply a -1 to 1 NDVI measure of photosynthesis activity. Landcover classifications are created based on entire year of AVHRR imagery looking at vegetation onset and drop-off timing coupled with the other datasets."

• Geosphere Project by Tom Van Sant
  • created from "multiple whole Earth mosaics of satellite scenes, utilizing two visual bands and three thermal bands from the NOAA TIROS satellite"
  • Version 1 (1990)
    • resolution: 4.6 kilometer per equatorial pixel (9k by 4.5k)
  • Version 2 (1997)
    • resolution: 1 kilometer per equatorial pixel (43k by 21k)

• WorldSat International Inc.
  • "NOAA, 1km, cloud free, LAC, Earth image"
  • co-registered to 1 km digital elevation data and incorporating shaded relief as well as ocean bathymetry
  • they have licensed to many groups including
    • companies like Intrinsic and Omnitect to demo their texture paging
    • National Geographic / ESRI MapMachine
      • WorldSat or Earth Imaging?  "Using continental mosaics release to the public domain by National Geographic, Earth Imaging reprojected, assembled, and processed a cloudless composite portrait of the entire planet."
  • doesn't look as nice as the Geosphere or Blue Marble images

• ARC Science Simulations
  • "Face of the Earth™" is a natural-color image at 1.1 km
  • project started in 1993, based largely on NOAA-11 AVHRR
  • cloudy image at 720×360 pixels, free with some restrictions
  • complex licensing with "single" vs. "multiple use"
  • for whole image, see their price list

• Planetary Visions
  • 1km global images, primarily based on AVHRR ("three satellite systems and four digital maps") from the 1990s.
  • 500m global image, working with the German Space Agency, DLR.
  • their 1km image was used for Van Sant's Geosphere version 2
  • they also license a water mask, cloud and nighttime layers, and some shaded bathymetry

• GeoCover from Earth Satellite Corp (EarthSat)
  • many composited products available, but no full earth?

Price Summary (single / multiple use - not all licensing terms are equivalent):

Provider	8 km	4 km	2 km	1 km	notes
Geosphere				$call	"We will beat any offer from another vendor."
WorldSat				$5k / $7.5
ARC Science	$1500/ $2500	$2100/ $3500	$4.2k	$7.2k	"Prices are for film, TV, and video productions"
Planetary Visions	$300/ $600	$700/ $1400	$1500/ $3000	$3500/ $7000	"Never knowingly undersold"
TruEarth	$2500	$3500	$7k	$12k	Even the "free" 32km is still under their license.

Other Planetary Bodies

• Evil Dr Ganymede's Planetary Map Hub
• Björn Jónsson's Planetary maps
• Wm. Robert Johnston's Cylindrical planetary maps
• See Also: Beyond Earth