It’s roughly 5000 x 5000 km, so 250 gigapixels. With 24-bit color, that would be about 700 GB uncompressed. Lossless compression can probably reduce that by a factor of ten or more.
It’s just a rough guess based on the redundancy in that image (limited range of colors, no hard edges). Lossless compression ratios can vary wildly depending on image contents.
This may be a little off topic, but does anyone know of high resolution public domain datasets that can be used as basis for the rendering of the Earth's surface? Normal, albedo, etc.? Do they even exist? I know Nasa has some but what I found was tiny (100k res images and such are really low res when we're talking about the entire planet).
Sentinel 2 images are freely accessible, paid by european citizens through the copernicus program. There's also landsat 8 images, of similar resolution (10m/pixel for visible, lower in infrared bands). The revisit time depends on the latitude, but roughly you have a new image of the whole earth every week.
I would suggest lower casing the "M" as it stands for "meters" . By reading the submission title (the article one is correct, I don't know why you changed it) I couldn't figure out which mega units it was referencing (pixels, bytes,?)
I saw this comment several hours after submission and it was already too late to edit the title. I copy/pasted the title from the blog, so I guess it’s HN who capitalized that letter.
Worth it for the discussion regarding optimal scales for aggregating pixel stats.