It may be hard to believe, but this is not a real image of Earth from space at night.
Yes, this is northern Europe. But no, it is not a photo.
Nope, not the real United Kingdom.
They're computer renderings created by Anton Balazh, a graphic artist who lives in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Balazh liked working with 3D programs, he tells Tech Insider, and thought a model of Earth would be fun to make.
So he did, but it wasn't an overnight project.
Balazh spent "several years gradually complicating the model," he says.
For realism he downloaded countless gigabytes of real satellite images from NASA's Visible Earth catalogs.
Then spliced in bathymetry data for a realistic-looking ocean floor...
...And sea level data for accurate coastlines.
And, using NASA-based topography data, lifted up mountain ranges that would normally look flat from space.
He also layered in city light data collected by the Suomi NPP satellite, which orbits the Earth.
A series of images like the collection here takes Balazh a month to prepare.
"There are many different tweaks" to polish a shot, he says: amping up city lights, raising mountains, or casting artificial moonlight in just the right way.
Each image has about "20-30 million polygons" to form realistic 3D terrain.
And the 5,000-by-5,000-pixel files would take dozens of mobile phones to display at full resolution.
"Rendering a single image takes ... tens of hours on a multi-core computer with 32 GB of RAM," he says.
Balazh sells his images to stock image services, which he says "sell well every day."
His model of Earth pulls in enough money for him to take vacations...
...And enjoy all that the real Earth has to offer.
