Earth imagery sources

The globe uses historical composites on a smooth sphere. Lighting, atmosphere, cloud opacity, and the subtle blue ocean tint are illustrative. These layers depict different dates; this is not live weather, terrain, or a reconstruction of a particular moment.

• Daytime: NASA Blue Marble Next Generation, July 2004. NASA Earth Observatory, imagery by Reto Stöckli; MODIS data from NASA's Terra satellite. The 21,600 × 10,800 source provides the 4K overview. Eight full-resolution 21,600 × 21,600 lossless GeoTIFF source regions (A1–D2) provide a separately hosted detail pyramid at the full native 86,400 × 43,200 pixel grid (NASA’s nominal 500 m resolution). Detail tiles use WebP quality 100 with high-quality color subsampling. The finest level is not downsampled; compression is still lossy. Only visible detail tiles are requested. Original image · NASA Blue Marble · Full-resolution regional sources (July).
• Night: NASA Black Marble, 2016. NASA Earth Observatory; Suomi NPP VIIRS nighttime composite. The grayscale 3 km map is resized to 4K and tinted warm in the shader; light intensity is artistic, not calibrated radiance. Original image.
• Clouds and roughness: Solar System Scope. NASA-derived Earth texture data, provided under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Obtained from the Three.js Earth example's packed texture (green: roughness, blue: clouds). Resized to 2K, vertically oriented, mipmapped, and compressed to KTX2; cloud opacity adjusted in the shader. Creator and license. Clouds are a static illustrative composite.

NASA imagery is used for educational visualization; NASA does not endorse this app. See NASA media usage guidance.

Textures use KTX2 / Basis Universal compression. The included Basis transcoder is Apache 2.0 licensed; license. Production imagery loads from our dedicated asset hostname; local development can use the included texture files. No third-party imagery API is used.