Spinning Earth Animated Gif Demo


This is my first attempt at creating an animated GIF. I wanted it to be a good quality one, so I brought out my XEarth program, and painstakingly saved every frame of a rotating image, then brought it up in GifBuilder.

OK, it's 557k, that's true. But how many animated GIFs do you see that are 248 frames at 30 frames/sec, for 7.5 seconds? ;-} If anyone can tell me how to compress this further, please do. To my knowledge, nobody else has taken this quite so far. I think it's pretty cool.

It's not perfect. I think I may have skipped a frame as North America was fading to the dark side. And I can't get Netscape to go through the frames at a set speed, instead of as fast as it can.

It took a while to save all the frames, but it's easier than I thought. If you like this image, feel free to use it, as long as you send me an E-Mail with your URL.

John Pamplin

pamplin@vhp.vanderbilt.edu