Nothing but Blue Skies
I worked in the graphics hardware group at Stellar back when Tom Van Sant created his wonderful image of the entire earth with no clouds. He created it using one of our GS1000 systems. It involved a lot satellite imagery, and an amazing amount of hard work by Tom to assemble all of the pieces. For every pixel, he had to go through the images to find one that was taken on a cloudless day. The result was really amazing to see.
Google has just announced that they’ve mined hundreds of terabytes of Landsat imagery to create a new, cloudless satellite layer for Google Maps and Google Earth.
The result is a wonderful implementation of Tom’s vision at a resolution we could only dream of back in the days of the GS1000.