Views of the Earth

Credits Page

For creating the images on this site i made use of various free software and free data sources. And as often the quality of free products is equal if not superior to those you have to pay for.

Programs

• The most important program used for creating these image is the Persistence of Vision Raytracer and its unofficial variant MegaPOV. Special thanks go to Ryoichi Suzuki for his work on developing the isosurface rendering system in POV-Ray.
• Geospatial Data Abstraction Library
• ImageMagick
• The GIMP
• Generic Mapping Tools

Data Sources

• The Blue Marble datasets created by Reto Stöckli and his colleagues provide very useful moderate resolution global data for the surface coloring.
• The USGS FTP server for the SRTM data set offers uncomplicated access to global elevation data.
• The USGS Seamless Data Distribution System - Despite a user interface that is quite inefficient for regular use this provides a lot of useful data sources.
• The Global Land Cover Facility of the University of Maryland is a great source for Landsat Imagery.
• The USGS Landsat Archive which provides a large collection of Landsat Imagery.
• The OnEarth site provides easy access to a global Landsat Mosaic.
• Jonathan de Ferranti's website offers invaluable data to fill voids in the SRTM elevation data sets as well as 1 arc second data sets for some parts of Europe.
• The Geobase site offers elevation data and other information for Canada.
• From the INEGI site a 1 arc second elevation grid of Mexico can be downloaded.

For more detailed information on the problems of data availability see a separate page.