screen shot By John E.
Mosley
Orbital View of Home
Planet Earth
Matt Giger (Lunar Software, P.O. Box 14664, Port-
land, OR 97293).Shareware for MacOS and PowerPC
processor. $29.95.
T
his nifty program shows a
three-dimensional globe of the
Earth with continuously updated
daylight and night shading. View the
lighting conditions on the Earth now or
at another time and season, or view the
current cloud cover. You can rotate the
globe to see any geographic area, includ-
ing the poles, and even set it spinning.
Zoom in for a surprisingly realistic view,
licensed from ARC Science Simulations
(makers of Dance of the Planets software).
The geophysical globe shows major topo-
graphic features in addition to state and
international boundaries. Cities appear as
red dots during the day and yellow twin-
Advertisement kling lights at night. Put the cursor near
a city to display the local time.
Normally the program reads the system
clock and displays the Earth’s current light-
ing conditions. You can also accelerate
time to simulate the quick passage of a day
or a year. In accelerated-day mode, the
nighttime shadow moves across the Earth
in 30-minute increments. In accelerated-
year mode, the nighttime shadow pro-
gresses at two-week intervals while the
74 July 1999 Sky & Telescope ©1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
time of day remains constant. Using both
modes makes it easy to notice how the
daily lighting changes at different latitudes
during the year and why, for example, the
polar areas experience a midnight Sun.
What makes Planet Earth exceptional is
its display of current cloud cover around
the globe as imaged by weather satellites.
You need only have an Internet connec-
tion. While you are online conducting
other business, it automatically and quickly
downloads in the background the latest
low-resolution cloud images from a Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Web site. Images are
updated four times a day, so if you are on-
line frequently, your view of Earth’s clouds
is never more than six hours old. During
the course of today I watched a storm
move partway across the Midwest while
another approached the West Coast.
Planet Earth also can be used as a
screen saver.
The program is so cool that I called
other people over to see it. Simple and ele-
gant, it accomplishes its mission without
fuss. If you have a Macintosh, download
a trial version from Lunar Software’s Web
site (www.lunarsoft.com).
John Mosley supervises the educational pro-
grams at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.
He can be reached at jmosley@griffithobs.org.
The main window of
Planet Earth (left)
shows lighting and
current clouds
mapped from
weather satellites.
The control panels (above) let
you zoom in and out, show or
hide clouds and the night shad-
ow, and set the time (and run in
accelerated time).