5th October 1993

Eorbit1.zip, is a 360 frame fli of the earth rotating at 23.5 degrees to
the ecliptic seen from an elliptical orbit that varies between 20,000 miles
and 40,000 miles.

The earth's surface features are accurately modelled to 0.5 degree
resolution using a 720x360 height field for slight bump mapping and another
image for colour coded altitude contours.  The sea varies from light blue
to dark blue to black, and the land varies from green to brown to grey to
white.  The Atlantic ridge is clearly visible as are the Himalayas and lots
of other features.

The sun pops in every now and then featuring some camera flare, (an image map)
and the moon is just visible in a couple of frames, (but you have to look hard
for it as it moves against the background of stars!

For the anoraks...
Created by Andy Haveland-Robinson using Qbasic and the registered version of
Vivid2, plus height field data obtainable from ftp.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de
[134.106.1.9]  in /pub/dkbtrace/pics/earth.lzh
The image data was modified to sort and change palette mapping, then
converted to 24 bit targas for image mapping.

Thanks go to Frank.Neumann@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de for making the
raw images from the floating point data at hanauma.stanford.edu,
Eric Haines of Raytracing News, and to Ken Chin-Purcell for writing the
article publicising its availibility.

Enjoy...
Andy.

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