* Astronomy

NASA has released images of the Earth generated by its "Blue Marble: Next Generation" technology, which has allowed the space agency to create some of the most detailed observations ever made of the world.
The new imagery provides a detailed look at an entire year in the life of the planet. The monthly images reveal seasonal changes to the land surface, the greening and dying-back of vegetation in temperate regions such as North America and Europe, the dry and wet seasons in the tropics, and the advancing and retreating of Northern Hemisphere snow cover.

The new images are available free of charge to the public. Users can download images of the entire globe, or just selected regions of interest.
To use them you need to download World Wind, a fully 3D interactive globe, first, (45 Mb).
World Wind (version 1.3) lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there.

System Requirements
• Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, or XP
• Intel Pentium 3, 1 GHz, or AMD Athlon or higher
• 256 MB of RAM
• 3D Graphics Card
o nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra
o ATI Radeon 7500
o Intel Extreme Graphics 2
• DSL / Cable connection or faster
• 2 GB of disk space

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