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World Wind Central is a database and support site for NASA World Wind. First, we will see about the World wind. It is a 3D interactive world viewer, which was produced by NASA's Learning Technologies project, and released in mid-2004. World Wind provides the following features.

You can use Live search maps as a chart to prepare a tour guide, comment the local restaurants and show the best bike route. You can create and share these in formations with other users via collections. Collection allows you to create custom maps according to your own wish. You can create information about new movies, nearby park, the most exciting land marks in your town and everything else. You can share it with the whole world through Live search maps collection.

How to subscribe to a collection?

The latest satellite of the Landsat program is Landsat 7. This satellite was launched on 15th April, 1999. The main motive of the Landsat 7 was to provide cloud free and up to date images and to refresh the global archive of satellite photos. NASA manages the Landsat program whereas the collection and distribution of the Landsat 7 data is carried out by USGS. The users of the NASA World Wind project can view and navigate freely through the 3D images from the Landsat 7 from various angles.

World wind is open source software based on Java programming language and Open GL technologies. World wind provides two Dimensional views and can be run on Microsoft windows, Linux, Solaris and so on. World wind 2D Plus, will let you get 3 Dimensional view. Any application developers can make use of WW features and can develop a new software.

Forks: A fork happens in a project when the application developer makes use of an open source code from one software program and adds something to develop it and thus make it different software. World wind as it is a open source application has the possibility of forks that happened without the permission of WW.

Microsoft has launched new software- Virtual Earth to compete with Google Earth. It provides number of additional features in addition to normal mapping software features. We will see now what does Virtual Earth offer to us?

The Virtual Earth is a tool with integrated imaging, mapping and search platform, which can help your association to grow by developing stronger customer relations. It is a service, which provides viewing options like exclusive bird’s eye, 3D and aerial imagery with excellent mapping and search capability. You can incorporate private or public data onto your maps with the virtual Earth.

Live maps provide bird’s eye view of major cities in US and some selected countries in Europe. Microsoft’s window live local now included the facility of bird’s eye view to do local search, mapping, driving directions and yellow pages. This function offers 45-degree bird’s eye view covering one quarter of country’s population.

The service will be enhanced to other cities in the world also. These images are captured by Pictometry international by using low flying planes. These images are then integrated with road and satellite images to give 360-degree view so that you can view a place from all four directions. You can use zoom in facility to get a closer look of any building.

Satellite imagery is a collection of photographs of earth or other planet taken with the help of artificial satellite. Microsoft provides satellite imagery. Users can zoom in until they see the vehicles in the city photographs or sometimes even people who appear as a small black dot in the picture.

The clarity of the image depends upon the nature of the city. The user can view the satellite images with map details by using Hybrid option. This facility is available to US, Canada, UK, Germany, Italy, Japan and India. The resolution of the imagery also depends on the altitude of the satellite orbit and the instruments used for taking pictures.

World wind is the soft ware developed by NASA it is a free virtual globe. It is an open source community for personal computers which run on Microsoft Windows. The program covers NASA and USGS satellite imagery, aerial photography, and topographic maps. Plus publicly available GIS data on 3D models and other planets. This version of soft ware was created by NASA in the year 2004. The latest version of World Wind was developed by open source community members. The community members where from World Wind Central\ Free Earth Foundation it had its premiere on February 14, 2007.

World Wind is very simple to use so many of us think that it is a not a simple desk globe. It allows the users to number of things that desktop do not allow them to do. World Wind allows any user even a beginner to use the application easily. The easiness of this application does not hamper the magnitude of services offered by it. The users can zoom to any place on the Earth form outer space. Such is the capability of World Wind. To facilitate the feeling of authenticity to the users World Wind uses visually rich 3D effects for this purpose.

MODIS is an abbreviation for moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer. It produces time relevant data sets that are updated every day. Volcanic activities, dust, fire, floods, storms and smoke are cataloged by MODIS.

An easy and customized view of the information is produced by World Wind and it is marked directly on the globe. When the user clicks any one of the markers that are color coded, the full image is downloaded and displayed.

The publication quality material of MODIS images can be downloaded. It resolution is 250 m per pixel. The user can download a new and fresh set of images on a daily basis. The user can automatically skim through any number of samples through a tour mode present in World Wind.