Earth Viewer was written primarily for elementary school students. It shows the daytime and nighttime portions of the Earth for any day of the year.

You may choose either of two views - Globe or Map. Globe shows the planet as it would appear from space. Map shows a flat view of the entire surface. Click on the button to switch to the view you want.

When viewing the Globe, you can center the latitude and longitude of any point on the surface by adjusting the scroll bars, or by clicking on the point you want to center.

The date and time may be set as you please, and can be reset to the current date and time by pressing the reset button. Times are always shown in the local time your computer is set for.

The images can be animated by selecting the Animate button. Daily animation shows the Earth as it appears every fifteen minutes; Seasonal animation shows it every 7 days.

NOTE - I've added a list of cities to the control panel. In the globe view, selecting one of the cities from the list will rotate the globe so that the selected city is centered in the view. This is currently just an experiment, so the list is short; the list is not available from the map view, since it doesn't make sense there.

Please let me know what you think of this feature; if it's popular, I'll probably expand the list to include the world capitols.

Earth Viewer will take a minute or two to download and start - please be patient.

I would enjoy hearing what you think about Earth Viewer. Please write to me at the address below.

We're sorry - Earth Viewer is not available.
You must have a Java capable browser to use Earth Viewer.

• The images used in Earth Viewer were provided by The Living Earth, and are solely for educational use. They may not be downloaded, copied or distributed without permission.

  The images were constructed from thousands of satellite photographs of the Earth's surface during the day and night. Photos without cloud cover were selected for each area, and the results were reassembled into the mosaic used here.

• Earth Viewer requires version 4.0 or later of Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator for proper viewing. If you get an error message that the applet can't start, you probably have an older browser, and may want to upgrade.

• Printing directly from the applet is not possible, due to browser limitations. If you want to print the applet, center it in your browser window and do a screen capture; this can then be opened in a paint program and printed from there. See your computer's documentation for instructions on screen captures.

• Upon startup, the applet will rotate the Earth approximately to your time zone. This is a very rough approximation, and may not work if your computer is not set for the proper location. See your computer's documentation if you have problems with this, or if the displayed times are not correct.