That's cool, I think it might be cool to see a modern version generated at run time with a more detailed map. Well I guess if you were going that route it would make more sense just to map the texture to a sphere. But this shows just how darn easy some things are now. In a way I feel that a some tricks have become outdated and it is a real shame because they were so innovative at the time. Copper bars for example have little meaning anymore but they used to be such an innovation. This trick would have been very interesting at the time, the viewer might have never seen such a smooth Earth turning. Just rendering a rough sphere was taxing enough, just imagine seeing a sphere of hundreds of implied verticies turning at once!
