Desktop Earth

[Rodzilla]

No, it's not a google product.


It's better.


This is a damn sweet program that basically gives you a real-time view of the earth from space, on your desktop. The position of the sun updates every 5 minutes (at most). You can turn on city lights for areas in darkness. And you can get real-time cloud updates (every 3 hours at max, which is enough if you think about it...).

Hot: http://codefromthe70s.org/desktopearth_dl.asp

I've had this for a few weeks and it's damn sweet, especially stretched across a multi-monitor setup. It's depressing to watch the entire country go into darkness and then still be working as the entire country comes back into light...ugh.

 

[hal]

Neat!

 

[ilkman]

Ah! Even better when enhanced with this!

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/offhome/th2go/home.cfm

 

[[V]endetta]

That's wicked! Thanks for sharing.

 

[Maxx]

nice

 

[anaemic]

winner, you just made my new desktop

 

[Airmoran]

Same here. It's definately a neat toy.

I've got it currently set on crop to fit on my standard 4:3 monitor, so it's not quite as epic as someone with a widescreen display or multiple monitors. But it's still nice, especially at night.

Also, it's made me realize how friggen boring North and South America is. It's just two lumps of rock with lots of water around it. How exciting is that?

 

[Jackal]

Fabulous! It doesn't sound like it uses real current-upto-date images thou. Hence the 40mb file size. Perhaps I'm wrong. Anyone care to share thoughts on that?

 

[sid]

You know I had this it was really sweet till it started feasting on my RAM.

 

[arcanex]

Not sure if that program support other maps, but the Xplanet site has links to others:

http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/

If that program uses the Blue Marble Next Gen day maps, then you probably won't be able to find anything that looks better that's also free. There are a couple of other nice looking night maps freely available though, you can check those out.

 

[MrSmiles]

Ah! Even better when enhanced with this!

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/offhome/th2go/home.cfm

why is that necessary?

why not just plug 3 monitors into your pc instead?
or even 4

 

[Zxanphorian]

Pretty neat!

 

[ilkman]

why is that necessary?

why not just plug 3 monitors into your pc instead?
or even 4

With that you only need one output to run all three monitors.

If you hook them straight into your pc you'll need both outputs on the video card, and then an extra card, not to mention software that can tell the video cards how to render on all three monitors. I dont think SLI will allow for that either despite having 2 cards.

 

[Kantham]

/me install