High! (some six miles)

Perhaps some of you remember my great annoncement of "PoVEarth" from 
September 11, 2005 on p.b.i.... finally, I managed to get an early 
precursor of this gigantomaniac project: an animation of an "orbital" 
flight around Earth at an altitude of 10 kms! During the flight, the 
distance travelled, current geographical coordinates, the six closest 
capitals of sovereign countries, each with its distance and direction, 
are displayed, also a map changing between six zoom levels showing the 
current camera position are displayed in the upper third of the view.

Here is the URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lt1dsIPBuY

This animation uses a medium-resolution satellite mosaic texture from 
the "Blue Marble" series (8192 by 4096 pixels)... meanwhile, I started 
rendering an advanced version (0.2), using the Blue Marble July map at 
21600 by 10800 pixels (unfortunately showing no sea ice) and displaying 
also current altitude and speed on-screen. This time, it will be a 
"closed circle" of 20 orbits (each of them "squeezed" by 5 %) with 

which altogether will take about 96 minutes compared to the 40 minutes 
of version 0.1.

Version 0.3 probably will also feature realistic change between day and 
night (with a second texture showing city lights at 30000 by 15000 
pixels smoothly blending in at dawn), a rotating Earth, the Sun and 
Moon! Watch out!

See you in Khyberspace - www.khyberspace.de

Yadgar

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