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)
  • available as a Dymaxion projection image set for use with Enviro Earth View:
    • Tile size: 1024 (1.6MB), 2048 (2.5MB)

• 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 [no longer online as of 2008?]
  • 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 1km Vegetation and 1km AVHRR Global Land Cover Classification

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

Commercial Images

• 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
    • people 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

• The Living Earth®, Inc.
  • very pretty 5km standard image, 1km full image 
  • derived from "free satellite imagery" (NOAA), see page on how
  • price list, or $3500 for the 1km image (15 GB)
  • also sell the moon and mars

• 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	32 km	16 km	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		$540 / $900	$1500/ $2500	$2100/ $3500	$4.2k	$7.2k	"Prices are for film, TV, and video productions"
Living Earth		$1000	$1250	$1750		$3.5k
TruEarth	free	$900	$2500	$3500	$7k	$12k	"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