Request Update Earth night light texture to latest NASA Black Marble version

[lccrane]

Alright, I got it to work
But a small caveat remains: Unfortunately offshore lights cannot be shown. Apparently, the land-sea mask is also applied to the night lights, so all lights over water are switched off in Orbiter even if they are present in the night light texture.
But it definitely looks better than before:



Compare it to the old version:



But I still have to compile the Level 11 and level 12 versions, which is gonna take quite some more time.

 

[lccrane]

After another two hours of work I compiled a level 11 version that almost works as intended. Though, there's still some issue at level 11 that I have to figure out how to deal with.
I have some ideas what caused this, but investigating and hopefully fixing it is gonna take some time.



Here, you see that the definition of land and sea is inverted, such that offshore lights are present in the level 11 tile but no onshore lights are shown within this tile.



More screenshots of the new version:

 

[lccrane]

Here's some views of Antarctica with sea ice and Greenland:

 

[LinuxWannabe]

Holy cow. Honestly I would not be able to differentiate the 6th photo in the post above the post above mine, and real life pics from the ISS. Do you know what mods/settings/hardware is needed?

 

[lccrane]

Yeah, it's pretty amazing and looks really realistic now, even at level 10 or level 11.
The only addon I used is Reshade and in particular the eye adaption effect. It's not perfect but still better than the vanilla Orbiter graphics.

Anyway I managed to fix the issue with level 11 and I'm thinking about providing a level 11 version for download soon. Compiling the level 12 version is going to take more than an entire work day of computing time and a few steps I still have to do by hand.

Here's a few more screenshots in the meantime.



Over Cape Town






North Dakota


US Midwest


Atlanta & Florida






Western US

 

[misha.physics]

It looks incredibly beautiful. Please, add instructions for using Reshade and the effect settings that you used for these screenshots.

 

[francisdrake]

The night lights looks absolutely amazing!
I used to fast-forward when orbiting over Earths' dark side, but now looking forward to the new night-light textures!

 

[lccrane]

Okay, so I looked at a few different regions to see if all the work was worth it and if it's worth going for level 12 and I think the answer to both questions is yes. I calculated the approximate amount of work remaining to complete level 12 (extrapolating from my working pace so far) to be around 16 hours, so maybe another week if I work on it a bit every other day.

But as some might want to use the lower resolution level 11 version, which is already pretty useable, I'll upload it later today.

The new textures feature:

• A global coverage of Google maps imagery without major seams. In some areas if you look very closely you will see the google logo, but it's very faint (most of the areas where you can see it more easily (i.e. in the tropical rainforests) are usually covered by clouds) and just not possible to remove it. I removed it on all water surfaces where it would stand out the most.
• A global and highly detailed land-sea mask, so you will see reflections off tiny lakes, rivers and of course the sea.
• Global coverage of night lights, even on small islands and atolls - but unfortunately not over water, which seems to be a limitation of the architecture of Orbiter.

Since I managed to complete this within just a few weeks I want to celebrate it by sharing another load of screenshots of the results.
Thanks again for everyone who provided tips, suggestions and their opinions!

First of all, this is my effects and settings in reshade, I hope it's readable.





I use a value of 0.4 for the night lights and 15 for the ambient light level but I'm still experimenting with these.

Now, first for some sunglint over the Sea of Azov, the Dnepr river and a few lakes in eastern Ukraine, for you, Misha



An area of improved textures: Western Greenland with meltwater ponds on the ice sheet:



Northern Greenland:



Probably not better than before, but still nice: Grand Bahama Island



Flying into the night over Japan, with Tokyo on the left:



China with Beijing in the foreground:



Closeup of Tokyo and Nagoya:



Kyushu, Japan, as well as South Korea and China with Shanghai in the background:

 

[lccrane]

Melbourne and Tasmania (upper portion):



Japan



Taiwan:



Bangkok, Thailand:



Java, Indonesia, with over 151 million people the most populated island on Earth:



Hanoi, Vietnam (lower left) and Hainan, China:



Sydney and Newcastle, Australia:



Tehran, Isfahan (Iran) and the Persian Gulf in the background:



Delhi & Jaipur, India and Eastern Pakistan with Lahore:



Sri Lanka and Southern India with Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai:

 

[lccrane]

Sri Lanka, Chennai & Bangalore:



Cyprus, the Middle East and Nile delta:



Italy, Monaco, Nice:



Persian Gulf:



Bahrain, UAE & Qatar:



Lyon (France), Northern Italy, Alps & Central Europe

 

[lccrane]

Here's the download:

New Global Textures and Night Lights [level 11 version]

May 25, 2026

2016 VIIRS night lights & OSM, Google Maps and Sea Ice global coverage

• lccrane
• Scenery

 

[misha.physics]

Thank you, I really appreciate it.

 

[misha.physics]

After creating global tiles of level 12 I think we should think how to use the default high tiles of levels 13-19.

It would be nice to have opportunity to use, for example, two TREE archives, namely Surf(1-12).tree and Surf(13-19).tree. But I suppose it's not implemented for now.

I notice a strange tile: 11/62/204. It's darker that others:



It's here:

 

[lccrane]

It would be nice to have opportunity to use, for example, two TREE archives, namely Surf(1-12).tree and Surf(13-19).tree. But I suppose it's not implemented for now.

I notice a strange tile:

Yeah, that would be great if we could just add more texture archives for higher levels!

About the one darker tile: It might be a small hiccup of the plsplit64 tool, so it might be gone in the next version, I'll keep it in mind. Thanks for reporting!

 

[francisdrake]

The night screenshots are really remarkable! Downloading now.

One small comment:
I not looking North, maybe include a short hint on the viewing direction.
This may improve the overall awareness, on what is shown.
Like: "Cyprus, the Middle East and Nile delta, looking South"

 

[gamer19]

I've said before that it's beautiful and I'll say it again but... maybe lights are a bit too bright now ?
or maybe... dunno... does real life pictures really look like this ?

 

[DaveS]

I've said before that it's beautiful and I'll say it again but... maybe lights are a bit too bright now ?
or maybe... dunno... does real life pictures really look like this ?

You can adjust the brightness of the nightlights on the Options tab. Default is 0.5 with a range between 0 and 1.

 

[lccrane]

Surprise, surprise! Compiling the level 12 version went much faster than expected, mainly because there is a geometric oddity involved: At higher resolution there is a significantly higher percentage of tiles with no land area, such that much fewer files need to be written, because sea only tiles can be skipped. I did not consider this when I extrapolated the time needed to complete level 12. So writing the level 12 version only took about 3-4 hours, also because I used 4 instances of plsplit64 running in parallel.

So here you go:

New Global Textures and Night Lights [level 12 version]

May 27, 2026

2016 VIIRS night lights & OSM, Google Maps and Sea Ice global coverage

• lccrane
• Scenery

What's nice about this version is that it gives you nearly the same quality as the 16 GiB textures and even increased quality at high latitudes but is less than 5 GiB in size.
The downside of course is that it's missing areas with higher resolution, but I guess the next task would be to add areas of interest with even higher resolution.
As mentioned before, doing the whole world even at level 13 would be a huuuge amount of work, the main problem being that I do not know any dataset with both good looking land and water coverage and blending any two datasets without any unwanted artifacts requires doing a lot of work by hand. At level 13 the amount of work just skyrockets thanks to the exponential increase in details with increasing resolution.

More screenshots (the above screenshots would still look the same with the level 12 version):

Eyafjallayökull, Iceland; pronunciation: [ˈɛɪjaˌfjatlaˌjœkʏtl]



Lake & Baltic Sea reflections over Scandinavia (looking east)



London, UK



Chicago:



Shanghai:



Reflections from the Brahmaputra river (India):



Naples and Southern Italy:



Cape Town:



Svalbard / Spitsbergen:



Northern Hemisphere:

 

[misha.physics]

Thanks a lot. I'm exited to try it today.

 

[lccrane]

There are still a few issues with more ocean tiles but they only occur in a few locations and finding and fixing them is not so trivial.
But any reports will be appreciated, noted and eventually fixed.