Back in April we posted an update about World wind, the free open source 3D satellite and aerial imagery and at that time releasing 3D imagery of the Moon. Learn more here.

Since then, WorldWind continues to impress. Now available for WorldWind:

• Mars: In addition to the Moon which debuted in April, we now have Mars with full 3D terrain.
• SDSS: View the galaxy with outer-space imagery from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Venus: 3 image layers without 3D terrain + placenames
• Jupiter: Jupiter and 4 Moons + placenames

In addition to this imagery, you’ll find (also new):

• OnEarth–15m Landsat imagery
• Improved elevation data based on SRTM+ and SRTM. Includes global Bathymetry.
• ZoomIt! data: Additional datasets for parts of the US (MA, NY, IN, FL) and South Africa’s Robben Island

Finally, a bunch of the most popular plug-ins are now included in the core program (1.3.5). Including two near real-time datasets:

• Earthquake Plug-In: Near-Real-Time Earthquake display and Historical Earthquake Query
• Global Clouds (near realtime clouds): Displays a global cloud image.
• Movie Recorder: Movie recording script. Plays back a script file with camera positions and records each frame to sequentially numbered bitmap files on disk.
• Measuring tool: Measure distances/bearings on the globe.
• Starfield: Adds a dynamicaly rendered starfield background to World Wind using data from the Hipparcos catalog.
• Compass Rose: Renders a compass in World Wind.
• Clock: On-screen clock.
• KML Importer: Import Placemarks from KML and KMZ files.
• Zoom Extender: Double-click to control zooming in and out.
• Atmospheric halo: Displays a virtual atmosphere around the Earth.
• Overview Form: Displays an external window to control World Wind (only works for Earth).
• External Layer Manager: Displays a classic windows style form window to turn on and off layers.

Postscript: SEW Blog links to an article about how people are using Google Earth to spot places in North Korea. The same is true with WorldWind. For example, here is what’s reported to be a North Korean nuclear processing facility.

Posctscript 2: Material from MS Virtual Earth can now be incorporated into WorldWind. See this page for info.

Postscript 3: Don’t forget…Coming Soon is SkylineGlobe. A new powerful plug-in for the end user. More info, a review, and a link to be notified when it becomes available here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 and is filed under Geographic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.