Need to produce stunning images of our home planet but all you can find are old low-resolution textures on websites long forgotten by time, or a wild maze of links to scientific archives with horrific naming and obscure file extensions? Not to worry, I've done all of that for you and you can now just skip to the fun part of creating great visuals.

Creating planetary imagery is a strong passion of mine and to produce the best possible results you need the highest quality source material. I've poured countless hours into acquiring, processing and converting planetary maps into formats usable by artists, and that work has translated into what some may call ludicrous textures. I call it future proof.

This map was created from the data provided by the Suomi NPP, a polar orbiting satellite launched in 2011. It records a wide range of planetary observations, which include light sources both natural and artificial.

Combining and cleaning data from several different time ranges I've produced a very high quality 16-bit nightlights map of the entire Earth. The maximum resolution is ridiculously high at 86400 by 43200, which means the detail level is stunning and stands up to close scrutiny. The accuracy is so high you can actually see light coming from individual roads.

Please note that due to the nature of the projection the accuracy of the map is lower the closer you get to the poles. The resolution should still be more than sufficient for high quality closeups.

Since memory consumption and bandwidth is always an issue, I've divided the download into 86k, 43k, 21k and 8k archives. Grab them all, or pick the one best suited for your needs. The textures are delivered in TIFF format.