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NASA BlueMarble: Next Generation
gbnewby writes "Remember the NASA Blue Marble composite image of earth from space, completely cloud free? Today a whole new series was released showing earth scenes from cloudless days across all 12 months of 2004. These beautiful images come in many different resolutions and formats. NASA even provided some animations. We and others have set up web, ftp and rsync mirrors; let the Torrents begin!"
The best way to enjoy NASA's blue marble is through Celestia.
The creators call Celestia a "free space simulation" that lets you explore the Universe in 3D.
It runs on all platforms including my favourite, Linux.
"Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit. Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects."
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
NASA's open source world viewer project World Wind will have support for next generation Blue Marble on the 20th. In fact developers today got the beta xml with coverage of all thirty six new blue marble layers.