Enviro

Earth View

At startup, select "Earth View" and press OK.  You are now viewing the planet from space.

How to Navigate:

• To spin the viewpoint around the earth, hold down the right mouse button.
• To zoom in and out, use the shift key and the right mouse button to drag up and down.

Each known terrain area will be shown as a small red rectangle on the earth.  To switch to a terrain, just click within its rectangle with the left mouse button, which will take you to Terrain View.

Menu Commands for Earth View:

• Earth - Show Shading
  • Shows the earth illuminated by sunlight based on real, current time and date, according to your computer's clock.  Alternately, you can show the earth fully illuminated with no shading.
• Earth - Show Axes
  • Toggles the display of some informative lines in space:
    Yellow arrow shows direction of light from the sun,
    Green vertical axis is the earth's axis of rotation,
    Red vertical axis is perpendicular to the plane of the earth's orbit,
    Green array shows the direction of the earth's motion around the sun.
• Earth - Seasonal Tilt
  • Toggles whether the tilt of the earth's axis due to day of the year should be applied.
• Earth - Flatten
  • Toggles flattening of the earth into an Icosahedron - mainly useful to illustrate the icosahedral projection used to texture-map the globe evenly
• Earth - Unfold
  • Toggles the unfolding and flattening of the earth into the Dymaxion projection (Flat Earth View)
• Earth - Load Clouds...
  • If you have a file with cloud coverage of the whole earth, you can drape it on the Earth View.  It will be reprojected from geographic to dymaxion projection to display transparently on the earth.
• Earth - Load Clouds from URL...
  • Alternately, you can load the cloud coverage directly from the internet, such as a live cloud image from weather satellites.  There are many sites, such as on Real Time Cloud Map.

Keyboard shortcuts:

• 'e' will toggle latitude-longitude lines which follow your cursor.

Flat Earth View

When the earth is unfolded (with Earth: Unfold) it is displayed in the Dymaxion projection.  In this view, navigation is different:

• Use the Right mouse button to Pan
• Use both the Right and Left mouse buttons together to Zoom

Currently, point data is displayed in both the regular and flat earth views.