Earth from Space

Another my little webgl program, a.teall.info/earth.

Earth from Space, as it looks like in good old NASA photos from Apollo spacecrafts. The idea was to get a picture that most closely matches these photos. And main problem was that all several dozens of the photos I've found are completely different. Different colors, different color deeps, different widths of terminator, different sun shines. Brrrr.

Here we go:

So I tried to make some compromise. I have worked with glsl shaders a week and each day thought that everything is ok, just to understand next day that everything is wrong =) And there is no moment you can stop and say "well, now it looks right like it should".

I added background music as promised to my friend. There is only one track by now, but I will add some more ones with corresponded links to authors (after their permissions, of course).

"Find me" button places your location in a center of view. Locations are provided by your IP address, so no privacy infringement is permitted and no data stored or used in other cases.

You can rotate Earth by holding left mouse button or by tap-n-drag with finger, and change date/time by holding middle mouse button. There is snow appearing in winter time =)

In real-time mode (button ">" is blue), time is going as is, but render is performed only once per minute. Because the planet is spinning not so fast, you know =) So there is no reason to draw picture 60 times per second. Due of this, CPU and GPU are not much in power use and the page may be used as a wallpaper.

Available options:

• a.teall.info/earth#nogui -- no GUI, just planet and space;
• a.teall.info/earth#music -- music is auto-playing at page opened;
• a.teall.info/earth#nogui-music -- no GUI, but music.

Video:

UPDATE.
There are absolutely stunning online Earth photos from Japan Himawari-8 spacecraft:
https://himawari8.nict.go.jp/