I've been building a simulation of our local orbital system with the Moon and Earth in order to make my Earth simulator more real. Check it out at http://earth.technex.us. One thing I've been playing with is the atmospheric light map.

Using Earth simulations for various mundane things like wallpapers and looking at the weather is a fun way to use scientific telemetry about our planet. But it's really hard to pull all the data together in real time to make a photo realistic render of well.... our collective reality.

One of those really hard to solve problems is how light behaves when going through our atmosphere in order to simulate a photo realistic looking view of what you would actually see at the appropriate altitude. From the ISS we get very interesting photos that show these effects.

Simulating this is hard.

But seeing the light come through the atmosphere at much higher orbit changes the dynamics of how the light interacts even more!

This was just my first pass attempt. Others have made entire careers doing this.

It's no secret that the Artemis II launch has inspired me to do this but then NASA had this photo dropped into their inbox just hours after I started playing with this light mapping behavior.

Reid Wiseman / NASA

Which is when I got to see what it actually looks like.

Play with it on Github