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.
e.g. It would be great to blend that UK image, with a geological map with something like this image of the UK by night:
Most geographic charts and images are in formats that include a locations/scale/alignment. Mixing different coordinate systems (global vs uk local ones) needs the right settings. Good luck!
If you are looking to graphically align non-geostamped images, you should be able to figure out their corners by comparing them to a map with a known coordinate system, then use a .world file to specify that location stamp before importing them to Quantum GIS or whatever you use.
40 servers to download 600 gigabytes of data? Something does not sound right here. If they wanted to avoid overloading the nasa pipes, they could have asked nasa to fedex that amount on couple of hard-drives or something. At this day and age bulk transferring a terabyte or two of data should not be a challenge.
Some of our images were from NASA’s hot new GIBS[1] service, which was extremely fast. However, it’d only backfilled about 2/5 of the data we needed, so for the rest of it we were using a legacy endpoint that was launched around 2004ish and has some, let’s say, idiosyncratic caching and throttling systems.
Instead of setting up a special channel, we talked to them and figured out how to shotgun the downloads in a way that wouldn’t kill their cache or require them to give us special treatment. We thought of this on a Friday and wanted to have it ready when we came in on Monday, and it worked. Thus the somewhat blunt methods.
0. For any young persons in the audience, the reference is to “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” from Tanenbaum’s “Computer Networks”.
1. https://earthdata.nasa.gov/about-eosdis/system-description/g...
[1] “We called them up and said, ‘hey we’re going to hit you hard, what’s the best way we can do it for you?’”
Right now with this project we’re thinking about how to serve people making small- to medium-scale maps on topics like global environmental issues, shipping, travel, etc. At higher zoom levels (higher resolutions), our more conventional satellite and aerial imagery seems to be meeting people’s needs for now.
At the time I didn't really understand the value proposition. It was google maps without any of the useful API features like geocoding and routing. Plus they were using openstreetmap which at the time was lagging noticeably behind google data in my area [1].
Tilemill seemed nice, css to style maps. But google had a nice style wizard [2] that changed the maps on the clientside, no need to upload a custom tileset, which is what tilemill seemed to do.
To be honest I generally forgot about them. But then google started charging more for their maps, and I remembered them as an alternative. I still missed the flexibly google had for their map styles though.
However in the past week I've come to see them in a whole new light, in part due to this post, but also due to their vector map post [3] causing me to dig back in and play around. I now truly believe these guys are one of the coolest "underdog" startups I've encountered. They've been chugging along and have created some awesome advancements, or at least competitors in the online map space. I hope to continue seeing awesome work like this, those map images are gorgeous.
My only request is that they give a little more detail into how to create custom styled maps like they show in the vector blog post I linked to. The process of using their street maps with custom styles is a little hazy to me right now, although maybe I'm missing something obvious.
[1] It still does, but now only with minute details like service roads on the local university campus.
[2] http://gmaps-samples-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/styledmaps/...
http://blogging.alastair.is/i-had-no-idea-how-to-make-custom...
But it was written long before these vector improvements. I hope to find the time to work with them soon, they look awesome.
And HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5475571
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vruba/sets/72157631622037685/wi...
I kinda like this "average" picture, as it shows the snow/ice in a interesting way
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vruba/7910717584/in/set-7215763...
