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. You can also use the mouse wheel.
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 - Add Point Data
- Allows you to display a set of point data (from a Shapefile) on the Earth as small yellow points.
- Try the file Data/PointData/tridicon™ CityDiscoverer-users.shp to see the locations of the first 2260 tridicon™ CityDiscoverer recipients.
- Earth - Add Linear Features
- Allows you to trace, one at a time, linear features on the globe. Geodesic distance is displayed in the status bar. This is useful for illustrating shortest-path routes on the earth.
Keyboard shortcuts:
- 'e' will toggle latitude-longitude lines which follow your cursor.
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.