Subject: Re: Mercator Projection of Earth
Date: 	Tue, 10 May 1994 09:02:41 -0400
From: Mark B Sachs <sachs@crayola.cse.psu.edu>

I confronted this particular problem recently... and a topographic
map of earth is nice and all, but one with clouds looks rather more
realistic, I think. Fortunately, there is just such an image available:

ftp to ftp.univ-rennes1.fr
cd pub/Images/ASTRO/space
          
and grab "earthmap.gif". It's a mercator projection of the Earth's
entire surface, complete with clouds. I took the gif, converted it
to IFF, loaded it into DPaint where I erased a small info bar at the bottom
and resized it to be perfectly square, then wrapped it around
a sphere in Imagine. Voila, a _very_ realistic looking Earth; it looked
quite nice in the film our group did.

There's plenty of other good astronomy pics at that same FTP site.

-Mark



                           -=> RETURN TO CONTENTS!<=-