The Known Earth

I had been searching for reference material for what the Earth looks like from deep space, but could not find enough photographic reference. About a month ago, a friend pointed me at this amazing video called "The Known Universe" developed by the American Museum of Natural History in partnership with the Rubin Museum of Art. It was rendered using Uniview, a real-time astronomical visualization engine that created all the imagery based on scientific data. Do watch this amazing video that shows the extent of our knowledge of the Universe starting from the Himalayas within Earth's atmosphere out to the most distant cosmic microwave background radiation billions of years in the past as recorded by WMAP (the youngest baby pictures we have of our Universe):

Inspired by the video, I adjusted my palette to achieve the following look for my CG Earth. I purposefully chose a camera angle that matched one of the shots in the above AMNH video. If the imagery looks similar, it's because we both used NASA's BMNG data. The clouds are the same configuration, but I was using topography data from January 2004 (still winter in the northern hemisphere) and they are probably using a summer month. However, this is still not the photorealistic look I was going for (image dated 14 Oct 2011):

Recently I came across a huge online collection of Hasselblad photos from the Apollo missions. Even though the color fidelity of the photos are highly inconsistent, I now have access to literally hundreds of reference images of the Earth taken from deep space. I can now spend days balancing the look development to better match reality (assuming the Moon missions and the photos are not hoaxes that is :P)

More to come...