Realtime picture of mother Earth

• German

The resultat

Since Google Earth everyone likes Pictures of our home planet. Afraidly there is no chance to see pictures of our planet with real-time clouds in Google Earth.\r\n\r\nSome time ago, I”ve found a script that generates every three hours a realtime picture of mother earth. But this picture wasn”t taken by a satellite in space, it was generated by imagemagick using at least three pictures:\r\n

• A photo of the earth during daylight
• A photo of the earth during nigt
• A photo of real time clouds

Those cloudpictures you can get from the xplanet project, they are stored on different servers. Apart of the day/night combination I could reconstruate the script and now you can load it from here:As powerfull imagemagick is, somewehre is an end of that power. But this is, where GIMP”s power beginns! Within less steps you can have the same effect using GIMP:

1. Search for a picture of our home planet earth. On wikipedia, for example, you can have a really good one in a great size. Pictures of clouds you find on the servers metioned above.
2. Open the image of the earth with GIMP and scale it on the size of your cloud-picture, for example 2048×1024 or 4096×2048) pixel.  Click image → scale image.
3. Per drag&drop lay your Cloudpic over the earthimage.
4. Change the modus of the layer to „screen“.
   
5. The image is ready!

Realtime clouds

Imagemagick can do it so far, too. But come on, this isn”t the end! Now you can generate out of the 2D-Map a 3D image of mother earth. Do the following steps:

1. Make one layer out of the two. Click in the layer menu on „merge down“
   
2. Filter → Map → MapObject…
3. Pick Ball and, no backgroun; I disabled the light, but you can try it, let the sun shine
   
4. I took the following for earth rotation: x=0,0; y=5,1;z=15,4
5. After clicking OK the image is generated within seconds. Don”t forget to rescale the new image! Use the same size for width and height.
   
6. Image → Autocrop deletes the transparent border
7. optional: To generate a spacepicture you need stars! So create a new layer, color it black and click on Filter → noise ein HSV-noise Voilà: The realtime globe is ready!