world wind from nasa

World Wind from NASA

Okay, enough with the politics for a while. I've got something cooler.

It's free software from NASA, and it's called World Wind.

By now, I expect most of you know about Google Earth. It's a sort of

World Wide Earth browser that lets you see the surface of the Earth

from satellite imagery and turn it all around and zoom in close enough

and clearly enough that, depending on where you live, you may be able

to pick out your own house and tell whether you (or at least your

cars) were at home when the photo was taken. In fact, here is a

picture of my house, taken from Google Earth.

You can't quite see how cracked the driveway is, but I can tell it was

taken before we rebuilt the deck, so it must be a few years old. (That

faint fuzzy patch to the right of the deck that looks like a giant

grey dandelion puff is actually a pretty good sized pin-oak tree.) If

they get a little better with it, we could use it to inspect our roofs

and chimneys! My office window is high on the end of the house

overlooking the deck. You can't quite see me hard at work.

World Wind from NASA is similar, but different. You can rotate and

zoom in, and add all sorts of fancy overlays--but you can do it not

just with Earth, but with the Moon, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. Also the

stars. (And someone added a plug-in for the Death Star.) The

resolution of Earth isn't as fine, but I like it better for the

planets, anyway. For Mars and Venus, it'll show you where all the

spacecraft have landed. (I was amazed how many there were.) Here are

two pix of Mars. You won't see it here, but if you mouse over the

icons, it'll tell you the spacecraft names and dates. It also has a

bunch of scientific overlays if you're interested.

This second one is the landing site of the Opportunity robot buggy.

The software is Windows only, I'm afraid. And although I found the

installation easy, I had to reinstall something called .NET framework

from Microsoft before it worked. But the instructions are pretty clear

if you speak even pidgeon-geek. Give it a try!*

*But if it breaks your machine (heh-heh), you didn't hear about it

from me!