SATGLOBE4 - Visualizing Earth from Space: 3-D Rendering of NASA Satellite Imagery

Draw a satellite view of earth at 4 pixels per degree, with political boundaries and gridlines.

SATGLOBE4 - This file is a higher-resolution version of "SATGLOBE," provided at the request of several users. SATGLOBE4 renders a fully manipulatable satellite view of earth at a resolution of four pixels per degree, with added international political boundaries and gridlines. The imagery was obtained from NASA, and the globe was rendered using the MATLAB Mapping Toolbox.

The Mapping Toolbox is not needed to use this file.

In order to save storage space, this m-file loads image data from the file satglobe4.mat, and then creates the graticule mesh itself. This process allows users who do not have the MATLAB Mapping Toolbox to render the figure, but it does take a few moments to compute the mesh. Using this trick, the data storage is reduced considerably; however, once the figure is rendered, you may wish to save it as a regular MATLAB figure file to increase speed.

Notes:

(1)The uploaded zip file contains the satglobe4.m file which you will execute using the command "satglobe4", and also the satglobe4.mat file which must also be on your MATLAB path.

(2) You may wish to try different renderers for better performance. The default is zbuffer, but you may wish to try "set(gcf,'renderer','opengl')".

(3) I have observed that Aerospace and Defense companies have begun widely using this type of imagery in certain presentations. For higher resolution imagery or for more information, please contact the author. If there is interest, I will upload a higher resolution version at a later date.

Michael Kleder, 2004