Your guesses are correct; I did rename the NASA files to make them easier to
find on my workstation. Shoulda mentioned that in the posting above, huh?
:)

I did *not* get the landmask file from NASA's Visible Earth website; I don't
remember where I got it but it wasn't at NASA. You can do what I did and
Google for "earth landmask high resolution" (I think that's how I found it)
or better yet, you can create your own landmask file with any decent photo
editing program and the truecolor TIFF file from NASA's website. How to do
this is left as an exercise for the reader, but what you want to wind up
with is a two-color mercator image of the Earth where the land is white and
the water is black (that way, the texture map applies the specular water
highlights only to the black areas--where the water is).

One final note--there are many ways that my Earth model could be improved.
The cloud layer is an infinitely thin layer right now with no thickness.
There is no bump map to give land features any visible height (although
honestly, at the distances you'll normally place the camera from the model
you shouldn't see any height anyway--that's why I removed the bump map that
used to be there... the extra CPU cycles didn't produce any visible
difference that I could see). The oceans are a flat blue with no waves
(again, scale issues), and the specular highlights on the water could be
improved.

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