Good morning, Newdists.
It’s Caturday! Yay!
A Big Warm Caturday Welcome to all the Newdists!
Grab a cup of coffee or tea, something to eat, and please join us.
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Seeing photos of Earth from the space station is often moving and fascinating. They touch our emotions. All the places that have been photographed emphasize how fragile the planet is, and no national borders are visible. The photos underscore how strange it is that there have been (and continue to be) so many wars fought by kingdoms, empires, nations, peoples, ideologies and such, to hold on to bits of turf which from space looks like pixels of land.
Images of particular areas on earth such as the Rocky mountain range or the Andes seemingly appear flat from space. Those images fail to show the grandeur of those mountain ranges.
As you can see, it looks like mountains but it still looks somewhat flat-ish.
These photos below look better. However, they are not actual photos from space. They are tweaked, layered and exaggerated.
The same area, rendered at night.
These are exaggerated relief maps, made by Russian graphics artist Anton Balazh. He uses real satellite images from NASA’s Visible Earth Catalog and he alters them. The artist also uses GIS data to portray bathymetry and topography. He exaggerates the height of mountain ranges so they don’t look flat, as they somewhat do in the first two images.
Balazh uses the bathymetric and topographic information to ensure that the sea level and specific coastal shape in the image is depicted accurately, even while he splices in a realistic looking ocean floor. He does it in layers and it takes time, such that an image could take him a month to complete. The lighting is layered onto the image from data garnered through Soumi NPP satelite.
For Balazh, exaggerating the mountains, amping up the lights in cities and even shedding artificial moonlight through the night sky over the geographic site below, are all part of his style strategy — tweaking and texturing — which renders an iconic image. His work is unique, and beautiful.
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