Planet imagery sources

Earth

NASA Blue Marble Next Generation / MODIS / GIBS

The overview, 16K global map and finer regional tiles all use the same BlueMarble_NextGeneration layer. The global map joins four adjacent EPSG:4326 WMS cutouts without changing colour or contrast. Matching WebP cube pages provide detail from the opening view onward; close-up GIBS tiles add observed detail at up to about 489 m/pixel on desktop and 977 m/pixel in the mobile memory profile. The globe no longer changes to the differently coloured Solar System Scope daytime map.

This is a cloud-free 2004 surface composite, not live imagery. Snow and ice remain part of the surface. Clouds use the NASA Langley SatCORPS Global Cloud Composite (GEO+LEO, V2.30), processed from raw cloud phase and optical depth. An hourly job reads selected scientific-data ranges, creates 3240 × 1620 and 1620 × 810 WebP maps, and sends them through an authenticated Cloudflare Worker into R2. Browsers read only the shared R2 copy. This is recent weather with processing delay, not instantaneous imagery or historical weather matching simulation time. The info button shows the observation time and usable coverage; individual satellite inputs may be several hours older. Current source and processing metadata.

White cloud opacity uses the approximation τ/(τ+7.7); lighting and shadows are rendered separately. It is a reconstructed display of retrieved cloud properties, not a visible-light photograph. Clear snow/ice is transparent. Missing or invalid retrievals, mainly near the poles, are omitted rather than filled with synthetic clouds. Possible-cloud phases with valid optical depth are included. Fine maps sample every fourth source grid cell (registration within about 0.042°); the mobile map area-averages that result. The observed cloud map replaces the static shell completely and does not drift artificially. Failed updates retain the last good observation; after 24 hours the display falls back to the explicitly labelled illustrative NASA July 2001 composite. Turning Cloud layer off removes the shell and shadows. The rejected daily MODIS photo mosaics are not used. Night lights retain their existing Solar System Scope map (CC BY 4.0). Lighting, atmospheric haze and cloud shadows are rendered separately. Daylight brightness and the blue atmospheric veil are visually referenced to NASA DSCOVR/EPIC visible RGB photographs. The renderer applies the same lighting to every surface detail level, with a modest Earth-only cloud exposure gain. This is a visual approximation, not a photometric calibration; the source map pixels are unchanged.

NASA imagery reuse guidance · Source requests, processing and checksums

Saturn

RSS-Textures v18.6.1 — 16384 × 8192 whole-planet map

Credit: KSP-RO / RSS-Textures contributors. CC BY-NC-SA, as declared by the source repository. The derived WebP images retain this licence; commercial use has not been cleared.

The original observation and filter chain is not documented in the release. This selected map is not certified as verified visible-light-only imagery. It is a visualisation map with incomplete observation-level provenance.

Vertical orientation corrected from DDS; latitude reprojected onto a 60268 × 54364 km oblate globe. No invented cloud detail or colour adjustments added to the images. Neutral display illumination preserves the selected map's colour balance.

Processing, dimensions and checksums

Moon

LRO Moon Kit — December 2025 colour map

NASA / GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio / LROC / Arizona State University

LROC WAC 643 nm, 566 nm and 415 nm channels; exposure and white balance adjusted by NASA for approximate human vision.

NASA visualization product, not raw scientific data. Optical colour covers 70°S–70°N; poles use lower-resolution LOLA laser albedo and small high-latitude gaps were inpainted by the source producer. No new synthetic detail added by Cosmoscope.

NASA imagery; public reuse with credit, subject to NASA media guidelines

Processing, dimensions and checksums

Mars

Tianwen-1 MoRIC global colour orthomosaic

Tianwen-1 MoRIC / NAOC / GRAS / Chinese Academy of Sciences; HiPS and cutouts: CDS / Université de Strasbourg / CNRS

MoRIC visible-light images, November 2021–July 2022; photometric/geometric correction and true-colour reconstruction by the source team.

The source team corrected atmospheric scattering and illumination, reconstructed visible colour using the CIE 1931 observer and MMS spectral measurements, and used Korolev crater ice/snow as a white-balance reference. The source files retain that calibrated colour balance. The displayed Mars uses a restrained 1.25× chroma enhancement around linear-light luminance, consistently for the overview, detailed patches and terrain colour. Neutral ice remains neutral and there is no zoom-dependent tint. This is an enhanced display, not a new scientific colour calibration. View the unenhanced source colour. NASA's true-colour Hubble reference likewise shows earthy tones rather than a uniformly saturated red planet.

At landing-site scale, monochrome CTX/HiRISE photographs supply finer brightness detail and inherit local colour from the global map. This is a colourised detail view; colour is not measured independently at the finer resolution. Display lighting and terrain shadows remain separate from image colour.

The downloadable colour map is resampled to 16384 × 8192 (about 1.3 km/pixel at the equator). The existing CTX/HiRISE landing-site images remain separate, finer layers. Seasonal polar/cloud appearance belongs to the source observations. An additional 4096-pixel north-polar cutout from the same survey supplies about 414 m/pixel at the pole; it streams only as the cap is approached. Its registration was checked against the global mosaic, and the spiral trough geography compared with the ESA/DLR/FU Berlin HRSC polar mosaic. No pixels from that reference were copied.

ODbL-1.0, as declared for the CDS HiPS database. This derived WebP tile database is also available under ODbL-1.0; original observation rights remain with NAOC / GRAS.

Processing, dimensions and checksums

Mercury

MESSENGER MDIS low-incidence global basemap

NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Arizona State University / Carnegie Institution of Washington / Applied Coherent Technology Corporation / USGS; HiPS and cutouts: CDS / Université de Strasbourg / CNRS

MESSENGER MDIS monochrome reflectance mosaic combining NAC and WAC 750 nm images, selected for low incidence angles. This is a greyscale reflectance map, not an RGB colour photograph.

Resampled to 16384 × 8192 (about 0.94 km/pixel at the equator). Source illumination and residual photographic shadows remain in the mosaic.

ODbL-1.0, as declared for the CDS HiPS database. This derived WebP tile database is also available under ODbL-1.0.

Processing, dimensions and checksums

CDS data and access

The Mars and Mercury derived tile databases are made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. Attribution: CDS / Université de Strasbourg / CNRS and the mission teams credited above. This work made use of hips2fits, a service provided by CDS.

Each complete derived database is freely accessible under /textures/planet-tiles/{body}/: overview-1024.webp, overview-2048.webp and {level}/{face}/{row}/{column}.webp. Levels are 0–3, faces 0–5, and row/column range from 0 through 2^level−1. Mars additionally supplies north-polar face 2 at level 4 (rows/columns 6–9) and level 5 (rows/columns 12–19). Each image is 512 pixels with a two-pixel gutter. Source metadata and the transformations are included in the linked manifests. The original sources remain available through the source links.

Mars: Liu et al. (2024), A 76-m per pixel global color image dataset and map of Mars by Tianwen-1, Science Bulletin; dataset DOI 10.12350/CLPDS.GRAS.TW1.MoRIC-DOM_076_Global.vA.

Uranus and Neptune

No verified higher-resolution global replacement was adopted in this update. The existing textures remain unchanged. Larger image dimensions alone do not establish additional observed detail.