 When working on the game, the development team asked Halo developer  Bungie for any high resolution data they had to assist them in being  as detailed as possible with their SPARTAN and the SPARTANs  fighting arena. Some of the Halo 2 textures they had were sent over  and worked just fine in the SPARTANs arena, but unfortunately their  image of the earth could not hold up at that high a resolution.  Bungie had nothing nowhere near as high resolution image of the  earth from Halo 2, but they did have an extremely high resolution  image of the earth from one of Halo 2s commercials. After some  digging, the image was found and sent sent over and that is in the  final version of the level.