Here are some representative screenshots. I'm running the Debian 2.1 distribution of GNU/Linux and the AfterStep window manager (note the cool transparent aterms). The earth maps I use here are provided courtesy of The Living Earth, Inc.
xplanet-0.1.tar.gz contains the
source and linux binaries. Documentation is pretty rudimentary but will
be improved.
Xplanet is free software, distributed according to
the terms of the GNU
General Public License.
You'll also need at least one map
file. Some good sources are:
The Xglobe Maps page has a
lot of nice earth maps.
The Ssystem Home Page.
Ssystem is a interactive solar system simulator written using OpenGL.
http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov is
a good site for planetary images.
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/postgrad/thomasc1/render/planets/earth.htm
has some nice maps too.
I've compiled and run Xplanet successfully on Debian 2.1 and RedHat 5.2 i386 systems, but have had some problems with a Sparc Ultra running Solaris 7. I might try it on SGI IRIX 6.2 as well. If you get it running on another platform let me know. If you want to try porting it to Microsoft Windows or the Mac, it shouldn't be too hard; you'll just have to use routines to replace the Imlib and X calls that I have used (and there aren't too many).
You may want to take a look at Xglobe ,
which is a similar program written using the Qt library.
John Walker's Earth and Moon
viewer is an interactive page on the web which computes an image
of the earth at any time seen from any position.
This is very much a work in progress. The code is messy and undocumented and I'm sure it can be optimized some more. Now that the major features of Xplanet appear to work (for now), I'll work on cleaning up the code. And once I figure out how to build linux packages, I'll make rpm and deb files available.
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at hari@alumni.caltech.edu