World Wind Take 2

Monday's post about World Wind being great was completely wrong. THE PROGRAM IS AMAZING. John and I, along with a cast of others, spent Monday and Tuesday night cruising around the world looking at places through different satellites and just sitting in amazement. John tracked down his Grandma's farm and I was able to find the two houses I've lived in along with numerous other places of interest. We took spur of the moment trips to Africa, New York City, and New Orleans. This morning I took a tour of baseball stadiums starting with Milwaukee County Stadium and Miller Park (under construction in the image), moving to Cosmiskey Park in Chicago, and then I was off to the Bay Area to visit Pac Bell and Network Associates Coliseum in San Fransisco and Oakland respectively. Tonight maybe I'll have a tour of all the basketball stadiums in the NBA's Eastern Conference. Never before have I seen something like this, a standard website-based search does not compare. Yes I can pull up an image of an exact address in Terra Server, but I can not go view downtown Milwaukee as easily and start hunting for buildings. The ability to spin the mouse and move around the world effortlessly is one of the killer elements of NASA's World Wind.

For those of you that are using the program and experiencing lackluster results, try changing the satellite at the top. The urban area one works great for the countries biggest cities, because it's in color. The Digital Ortho feed is great for finding your house or any other building (that isn't covered in the Urban Area Ortho).

World Wind has also managed to start making a nice cache on my hard drive. It's currently weighing in at over 2.3 gigabytes of space, however this makes my most commonly visited cities load real fast.

NASA, keep up the good work.