SATGLOBE4e - Draws an idealized satellite view of earth scaled to match the WGS84 ellipsoid.

This file renders a fully manipulatable satellite view of earth at a resolution of four pixels per degree, with added international political boundaries and gridlines. The imagery was obtained from NASA, then postprocessed. The globe was rendered using the MATLAB Mapping Toolbox.

The Mapping Toolbox is not needed to use this file; however, if you have the toolbox, you will be able to use the plot3m command to add your own graphics. If not, you can simply use plot3. (In both cases, keep in mind the WGS84 scaling.)

In order to save storage space, this m-file loads image data from the file satglobe.mat, and then creates the graticule mesh itself. This process allows users who do not have the MATLAB Mapping Toolbox to render the figure, but it does take a few moments to compute the mesh. Using this trick, the data storage is reduced considerably; however, once the figure is rendered, you may wish to save it as a regular MATLAB figure file to increase speed. (You must place the included file satglobe4.mat on your MATLAB path.)

NOTE: Try using set(gcf,'renderer','opengl') for best on-screen performance and set(gcf,'renderer','zbuffer') for best printed performance. (This will vary depeding on your computer system, so try experimenting.) The default renderer is zbuffer in order to obtain decent cross-platform performance. If your image seems sub-optimal, switch to OpenGL.

No warranty; use at your own risk.

ver 1.0 Initial writing. Michael Kleder, 2004
ver 1.1 Scaled to WGS84 ellipsoid, named "satglobe4e". Michael Kleder, Sep 2005

Submitted in response to a MATLAB Central File Exchange user request.