Whilst making 'How Earth Made Us' I needed to locate a wide range of satellite imagery. Fortunately all the images produced and owned by Nasa are in the public domain and are free to use. It's also quick to access if you know where to look so here is a brief overview of the sources I used.
Blue Marble
If you want to add some global sparkle to your film then your first stop might be Blue Marble from Nasa. This is an archive of free-to-use extremely high resolution images of the Earth that most TV graphics companies use to generate the 'globes' used in TV programmes.
To view the full sized image of Blue Marble you'd need a monitor as big as your house (1 thousand million mpixels) so I think the quality is high enough for most TV purposes! However, you'll need some real hardware fire-power and photoshop 8 to even stand a chance of opening it. At full resolution you can zoom fairly well into specific regions and countries.
If you have a simple desktop then a safer bet might be to use the lower resolution versions (still 2km and 8km pixels). This resolution would still be good enough for creating wide 'locators' such as entire continents or countries but it will not allow you to zoom in closer.
Download the KML file to allow you to view this as a live layer of satellite imagery on Google Earth.
ESDI
Another source for specific regions is the Earth Science data interface. if you have very specific requests then it might be worth contacting the archive staff as they are very helpful.
The Blue Marble - used by most graphics companies to generate earth shots (Nasa)
Images of natural phenomenon
Modis
The 'Rapid response system' is used to view near-real time satellite imagery which is useful for navigating and downloading more localised and regional images, as well as images of natural phenomenon such as hurricanes, plankton blooms and dust clouds. You can search the Modis archives here.
Visible Earth
Similar to the Modis archive Visible Earth is a catalogue of NASA images and animations.
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Low pressure weather system showing the spin of the coriolis effect (Nasa)
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Plankton Bloom - coast of Patagonia (Nasa)
Plankton Bloom in the Barents sea (Nasa)
Mount St Helens (Nasa)
Himalayas (Nasa)
Iceland (Nasa)
JSC Digital Image Collection has more than 9000 photos spanning the American
space program. Although usually much lower resolution that the
satellite imagery some of the photographs taken by astronauts can still be
useful in creating aerial views of the planet.
I used this image of the Jet Stream in 'How Earth Made Us'. To turn it from a still image into a moving jet stream all I needed was a subtle bit of animation.
Jet Stream (Nasa)
Aurora borealis (Nasa)
Cleveland Volcano, Aleutian Islands (Nasa)
All it takes a little 2D animation to bring some of these images alive, e.g. subtle swirls in a hurricane or plankton bloom. These effects can even be achieved in a simple editing package like final cut pro.
Hurricane Katrina from Visible Earth (Nasa)
Mixing aerials & satellite imagery
Watch the super pull-out from our presenter in the sequence below. To achieve this we used Nasa & EDSI satellite imagery and seamlessly mixed through from heli-gimble aerials.
Timelapse View from Space
Using free images you can create stunning sequences such as this one
called a 'Time lapse view from space'. This was created using photographs taken by
the crew of expeditions 28
and 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October,
2011.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
