I also routinely make visualizations of geographic and weather data (including satellite imagery) as part of my job and it doesn't surprise me. Once you've 1) a

I also routinely make visualizations of geographic and weather data (including satellite imagery) as part of my job and it doesn't surprise me. Once you've 1) acquired the data you need (in this case, we're talking about images of countries without clouds and corrected for exposure across the Earth) and 2) fixed your data (because it's never in the shape you want, or the map projection you need), the core of the algorithm can seem pretty trivial sometimes, especially because R and GDAL come with a very large set of ready-to-use algorithms (and I'll never thank the creators of their respective libs enough for that).