“Generated using data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter aboard the Mars Global Surveyor
spacecraft and satellite imagery from the Blue Marble Next Generation project. Sea level was
set non-scientifically, but such that it would flood much of Valles Marineris as well as provide
shoreline near the top of the cliffs on the outer edges of Olympus Mons. The clouds are straight
from NASA’s Blue Marble NG project and height mapped (rather arbitrarily, but looks good) by
relative opacity (The more opaque a point, the higher up in the atmosphere I put it). The main
texture was “painted” in GIMP over a two dimensional DEM I had done using MOLA elevation
data from the Mars Global Surveyor. This was rendered using a digital elevation modeling
program I am writing, jDem846, with some extras baked in through it’s scripting interface, and
encoded to video with ffmpeg.”