First of all, this is super super super cool. But also... I'm super confused about the nighttime imagery. Looking at daytime imagery from this afternoon over the US, everything looks legit -- it looks "real", shadows from clouds get longer as the sun gets lower in the sky, shadows on mountain ranges change, etc. But as soon as it transitions to night, all realism goes out the window. Urban areas are absurdly bright,…
Yes, the night side uses a combination of infra-red imagery with a static image of the Earth at night. Without that image all the landmass and cities would disappear into black, so it helps give the IR imagery context. And it looks nice. It’s a common technique called GeoColor.