Desktop Earth is a wallpaper generator for Windows. It runs whenever you're logged on and updates your wallpaper with an accurate representation of the Earth as it would be seen from space at that precise moment.
Day and night is accurately represented depending on the Sun's overhead position (which depends on both the time of day and the day of the year) and both the snow cover and the foliage changes with the seasons.
Images are created from high-resolution textures (2560x1280) so it's perfect for that QSXGA display.
An image is generated every month to accurately depict snow and foliage changes, and the night view is simply stunning.
If you just want to stick with one view of the earth, there is a huge stash of wallpapers in the install directory that can be used permanently without being connected to the internet or having Desktop Earth installed.
INSTRUCTIONS
After installation DesktopEarth will start automatically and display the following configuration dialog:
This should be pretty self-explanatory, but here are some pointers:
- Image Options control basic image parameters such as what the wallpaper is centered on and how to deal with an image that does not match the aspect ratio of the source: add black bars or crop. You can also choose to add clouds to the image - more on this topic a bit later.
- Display Options allows you to select between wallpaper styles. The Regular Wallpaper setting should work well for everyone, even in multi-monitor environments. When your destkop's size or shape changes the Earth wallpaper will change with it in a few moments.
This brings us to the final point: clouds. The cloud image bundled with Deskop Earth is (obviously) static, but selecting "Cloud Updates" from the systray menu and enabling automatic updates will retrieve a semi-realtime cloud image from the Internet. Since cloud formations big enough to show up on these images move very slowly, it does not really matter that the images are a few hours out of date.
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