Looking for the source of a sky texture

[PrinceOfFunky]

I'm diving into some archived webpages about unreal and ut99 and I found this EpicGames logo which can be found at the beginning of the first Unreal 1 intro video released before 1997.
That background looked familiar and I then remembered that years ago I looked for info about a sky background texture from this picture, there was a discussion about this last picture on this forum wondering if it was official or not.
I then compared the sky with the one in the EpicGames logo to find out they both match. While trying to find the source of this sky texture, I found out that the sky was used as a background for many pictures until around 2006, on Google the oldest source I could find for the clean picture is this web directory, the directory is not that old but the sky picture in it was last modified in 1997 (Although there are two versions of that same sky picture.

How can I find the original source?

[rjmno1]

maby on the wayback machine.

https://archive.org/web/

good luck

[esnesi]

Tried reversed image search?
Maybe more incl source hopefully pop up

https://www.tineye.com/

[PrinceOfFunky]

maby on the wayback machine.

https://archive.org/web/

good luck

With "I'm diving into some archived webpages" I meant that I was using archive.org.

Tried reversed image search?
Maybe more incl source hopefully pop up

https://www.tineye.com/

Yeah that's how I found the 1997 clean up sky background.