Anyone with a passion for photography has had more than a chance to admire those pictures of Earth taken from satellites orbiting our planet. But none of those pictures offer as many 3D details as the map above. Created by NASA in cooperation with Japan’s Ministry of Economy, the map covers Earth between the 83 North and 83 South parallels.

The big picture is comprised of 1.3 million stereo images captured by ASTER. ASTER is a special instrument used for taking maps of land surface temperature, elevation and reflectance. The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer is found on NASA’s Terra satellite and it was used to capture all the required photos. Once that was achieved, the 3D map was rendered from 23,000 GeoTIFF files. Each file covers 1 square degree of the globe so this map is definitely worth checking out.

via JPL