EarthView

EarthView displays realistic views of planet Earth with daylight and night shadows. This program serves as a dynamic desktop wallpaper and screen saver. It downloads current cloud data from the internet and renders city lights, atmospheric effects, and seasonal changes in vegetation and ice. The full version includes free low-resolution cloud data download once per day.

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• Day and night view. EarthView calculates the real-time sun position and displays the terminator line between day and night across the Earth's surface. Sunlit areas appear with natural colors, while night regions gradually darken, showing city lights on the nighttime side.
• Current cloud download. The program connects to weather servers to obtain updated global cloud cover imagery. The limited free version uses demo clouds. The full version enables real cloud data download at low resolution with daily updates at no additional cost.
• Atmospheric effects. EarthView simulates light scattering in the atmosphere, including glow around the planet's edges and darkening toward the poles. Blue sky color renders at the Earth disk edges and haze effects appear on map view horizons.
• Urban areas and city lights. The program database contains over 140,000 cities with coordinates and time zones. In night view, metropolitan areas appear as concentrated luminous dots, representing street lighting and urban light emissions.
• Globe view and map projection. Users can switch between two display modes: flat cylindrical projection (rectangular world map) or three-dimensional globe view with spherical perspective. Both modes maintain Earth rotation and sun position.
• Seasonal maps with vegetation and ice. EarthView includes maps that change according to the season in each hemisphere. The maps show vegetation advance and retreat, snow cover in temperate and boreal regions, and sea ice extent in the Arctic and Antarctic oceans.
• Multiple simultaneous views. The program allows creating several independent views of the planet, each with its own angle, zoom, and configuration. This function monitors different geographic regions at the same time on separate monitors.
• Weather data per city. After entering a personal API key, EarthView displays updated temperature, humidity, wind speed, atmospheric pressure, and METAR conditions for any city in its database. Data appears as text overlay on the image.
• Multiple monitor support. On systems with two or more screens, EarthView assigns an independent view to each monitor. Each screen can show different regions, projection types, and zoom levels while keeping time and sun position synchronized.
• Configuration profiles. Users can save complete option sets as separate profiles. Each profile stores projection type, zoom level, cloud parameters, city visibility, atmospheric effects, and update frequency. Profiles load according to desktop configuration or resolution.
• Background and overlay images. EarthView allows adding logos, watermarks, or overlaid graphics on the Earth image. This function inserts corporate identity or marks in commercial displays while keeping the underlying map visible.
• Integrated screen saver. The program can function as the operating system screen saver. When detecting inactivity, EarthView starts Earth animation with continuous rotation. Users define cloud update interval and camera movement speed.

EarthView is developed by DeskSoft, a company based in Austria. The first version launched in 2004. Development began as a project to generate desktop wallpapers with precise Earth lighting representation. The application is written in C++ using native Windows graphics libraries. The main author has maintained the program for over twenty years, adding seasonal maps, cloud download features, and multiple monitor support.

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