Over the past years i have produced and discussed here various regional high quality and high resolution satellite image mosaics – the Musaicum series. These are available for licensing as originally produced, in the MGRS grid of the Sentinel-2 data they are based on. Obtaining the image in the original coordinate system ensures you get most out of the data, without quality reduction as a result of re-sampling.

But many customers naturally want to use the images in interactive maps and, for convenience and less processing work on their side, ask for the image in Mercator projection, which i can provide of course.

I now went a step further and processed all available Musaicum images – plus the Comprehensive Optical Mosaic of the Antarctic – into a ready-to-use tile set for interactive web maps. Like the original mosaic, these tiles come with an alpha (transparency) channel. This allows smooth blending with a background image layer for open water and for areas so far not covered by the Musaicum. And the system used to generate the tiles allows for selective updates when a new region becomes available or an existing region should be updated in the future.

Tiles are produced up to zoom level 14 at low latitudes, making use of the full resolution of the Musaicum images. At higher latitudes z14 tiles are pointless due to the variable scale of the Mercator projection, so tile generation is limited to z13 or even lower, depending on the local scale. Also excluded are areas with no image content. Tiles are generated in AVIF format, but can be produced in other file types like WEBP or PNG as well.

The total data volume of the tiles with the current Musaicum and COMA coverage in high quality AVIF format is 350GB. Of course, you can also obtain limited coverage of just one or more regions instead of all of them.

To give an idea how this tile set looks in practical use, i have set up a demo map with tiles up to zoom level 7:

You can look at this also with the Green Marble as background:

In case you are interested in licensing the Mercator tile set, or generally the Musaicum images, for your projects, have a look at the product page and contact me through the link there.