Here we have a small showcase where a company took pictures of Earth from space - something that when described clumsily by second hand observers has brought tears to people's eyes - and their goal is to build a base layer that is the idealized, cloudless view of our planet in peak vibrancy.
A map of paradise.
And it's generated by a clever, possibly elegant, algorithm using tools anyone could use (aside from a massive server farm).
This is perhaps the most appropriately, unambiguously beautiful thing I've personally seen here.
It’s just barely clever enough that no one thought of it before. It has to be really simple, because the innermost loop (estimating how cloudy a given pixel is) runs several trillion times.
using tools anyone could use (aside from a massive server farm)
EC2’s m2.4xlarge (> 64 gigs of memory, 8 decent cores) is going for $0.14/hour right now. You could run ten of those all day and spend less than on dinner at a restaurant with cloth napkins.
That said it should yield a dataset with twice the resolution of Blue Marble, which is cool. The size of a pixel will be 250m, i.e. a small town will be 2 pixel, as opposed to 1 pixel.
For high resolution imagery, you'd need to pay. There is 0.5m data out there, for about $5+ a kilometer, and I'd love NASA to dump a whole world data-set of this. But until then, I think Google and ESRI are safe.
VERY LARGE FILE http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/73000/7375... NASA's blue marble.
Is that really what's being described? I don't think anyone is discussing the libraries this is written on when they say, "Beautiful." They're talking about the actual maps, which are things you could print out and hang on the wall if you wanted to.