Desktop Earth

If you like satellite pictures of the Earth and the time of day…you can get them both with this cool little desktop program. It’s called Desktop Earth (get it here) and shows a satellite mosaic map of the world with the current time of day and time of year (updates every 5-10 min). If it’s the middle of the night where you live (what time zone your computer is set for) then it shows that part of the planet in the dark and with nightime lights…and vice-versa. It also has a setting for cloud cover. Althought the clouds are not real-time snapshots, they are only delayed by a few hours and, at a large scale, pretty accurate.

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