NASA World Wind

Anybody else see this yet? It's pretty amazing.

World Wind allows any user to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, leveraging high resolution LandSat imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) elevation data to experience Earth terrain (or any planet with the data) in visually rich 3D, just as if they were really there. Virtually visit anyplace in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps or along the African Sahara.

Looks pretty cool! Hopefully they get their server back up to the public soon so I can start downloading higher res images.

Yea, the server being down is a pain. But I’ve downloaded about 2.5gb of landsat7 cache files. Plus if you get on at like 2-4am, the server is usually up. That's the problem when you get slashdotted.

I was very excited about this program, particularly because it's free, but I'm a bit dissappointed in it. Maybe I'm doing something wrong though, so let me know if that's the case.

Quote:
Virtually visit anyplace in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps or along the African Sahara.

True, but it doesn't seem like you can do that all in high resolution. Even the USGS 1m data is not very detailed. What's more, it's in black and white and from what I've seen, it's extremely old. I was a bit suprised at how out-of-date the data was. I understand that these images aren't going to be daily or anything, but the Keyhole images were, on average, no more than about 2 years old. The USGS maps in World Wind, at least around me, appear to be about 10 or 12 years old.