Earth View   It is August 22nd and we are orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 23000 kilometers, currently passing Scotland where the local time is 11:30 am. The textures for the Earth's surface originate from NASA's Earth observatory and they were used without much modification. The main texture contains the planet surface as seen in daytime; a second texture contains the nighttime view (in the above image this produces the city lights in the USA). To restrict the sun's highlight to the water of the Mediterranean Sea the daytime texture is actually used twice, once for the land masses and once for the oceans. The atmosphere and a cloud layer were added in POV-Ray. The cloud layer is not very realistic, but I did not want to obscure too much of the planet's surface.

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