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.