Wonder how it compares with the GOES raw data, and also I wonder if a hybrid viewer would have any aesthetic benefits.
Do share your "live 3d ISS viewer" when done. I can imagine myself getting a smile or two from such a thing. :)
It took quite a while to work out how to process it to get a level of realism I was happy with. IR is tricky because the same level of grey could either be warm cloud or cold land, so just discarding anything below a certain level to try and get rid of the land also loses a lot of cloud detail. I've combined that IR map with another false-colour image which lets me recover some of that detail, then I'm also extracting clouds from a true-colour image which restores more detail for areas in daylight.
YUP!
I haven't made a cloud viewer, but I once fell into "the deep end" regarding false color and astronomy photos. Next thing you know you're deep in MATLAB playing with histogram equalization...
Going from the raw data that advanced sensors output to a beautiful picture is NOT always obvious, there's a lot of enjoyable applied math and programming in between. =)