Planetary Maps

Xplanet works best when the map file dimensions are a power of two, with the height being half the width (e.g. 2048x1024 pixels). Other map sizes will work, but performance will be degraded.

Some good sources are:

• Felix Andrews has compiled a list of maps at http://flatplanet.sourceforge.net/maps.
• James Hastings-Trew's planetary pixel emporium
• Some excellent earth maps created from MODIS imagery can be found on the Blue Marble pages at NASA's Visible Earth site.
• Wm. Robert Johnston has a good list at http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/spaceart/planetcylmaps.html.
• Björn Jónsson's planetary maps
• JPL's Maps of the Solar System
• Andrew Sumner's Xglobe Maps
• Whole-Earth Images
• Xglobe & Xplanet Maps
• Jan Kaluza has contributed a nice night map for earth.

Cloud Maps

I create a global cloud map every three hours using GOES, METEOSAT, and GMS satellite imagery downloaded from the Geostationary Satellite Imagery page at Dundee University. You can use these maps with Xplanet with the cloud_map option in the configuration file.

Scripts

Hans Ecke has a number of useful scripts available at http://hans.ecke.ws/xplanet to update your maps with the latest cloud images, satellite orbits, weather information, and recent volcanoes and earthquakes, and create images with different projections and viewpoints.

Michael Dear provides standalone binaries for linux and windows to create marker files for earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, and satellites, as well as the markerfiles themselves and a cloud map mirror. His page is at http://www.wizabit.eclipse.co.uk/xplanet.

Steve Jones has written a script to allow xplanet to work with the e17 window manager.

Other stuff

I've created some files at varying resolutions with GMT which you can use with the configuration file option "arc_file":

• coastlines [crude, 79 KB gzip file] [low, 500 KB gzip file] [intermediate, 2173 KB gzip file]
• political boundaries [crude, 13 KB gzip file] [low, 48 KB gzip file] [intermediate, 151 KB gzip file]
• state boundaries within North and South America [crude, 11 KB gzip file] [low, 37 KB gzip file] [intermediate, 106 KB gzip file]

These are contributed marker files.

• earth is a marker file containing ham radio prefixes, compiled by Peter Lemken.
• earth is a marker file containing many points of interest, compiled by Barthel aus Pennswald.
• earth is a marker file containing most of the world's capitals, compiled by Jan Schaumann.
• moon is a marker file containing a list of moon seas, lakes, craters, compiled by Loek Jehee.