Thu
Mar
16
2006

Desktop Earth

Desktop earth

Simon pointed me to this, but it’s awesome.
DesktopEarth runs whenever you are logged into your computer and updates your wallpaper with an accurate representation of the Earth as it would be seen from space at that precise moment.
So night and day show and the ‘band’ of daylight moves across the face of the earth, very closely in sync with real time.
Note: the images are NOT realtime, but it is still very cool…

Here’s an example on my two monitor setup (click image for a larger popup):
Desktop earth

Posted by Neil, 16 March 06
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Comment

  1. The image of land/sea is not real-time, but you can set the clouds to be close to real time… I’ve been comparing with the BOM satellite image and it’s accurate. Pretty clever stuff.

    — Simon · Mar 16, 11:57 AM · #

  2. Good point, I had noticed that the clouds change. Looks like it uses an overlay system of some kind… Very entertaining (for a geek)

    — NeilA · Mar 16, 12:02 PM · #

  3. I dunno if it’s from desktop earth, but that landscape up on your file tabs looks a bit like Katoomba and is making me homesick!

    — Jane · Mar 22, 05:28 PM · #

  4. Bit further north west of Katoomba Jane – Blackheath to be exact. ;-)

    — NeilA · Mar 23, 02:00 AM · #

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