Our site now has a chapter where you scroll a camera through low orbit, visiting the four places we operate from. It looks like it should weigh fifty megabytes. It ships in roughly 1.5, and it is built almost entirely from public-domain science data.
Real data, baked hard
The planet is NASA Blue Marble imagery, resized and recompressed by a build-time generator. Never hand-edited: when we want a change, we change the generator and bake again.
City lights are not a texture. A script samples a NASA night-lights raster into about 46,000 weighted points packed into a small binary buffer, rendered as glowing sprites. Crisp at any zoom, because they are geometry, not pixels.
Close-ups use a two-stage patch trick: whole-earth imagery is about 10 km per pixel, hopeless at 200 km altitude, so the generator bakes high-resolution patches (down to 76 m per pixel, from Sentinel-2 cloudless data) only around the four cities the camera actually visits.
