aclJohn's Geography Finds

I'm sure many of you have used Google Earth well Marble is an open source virtual globe and world atlas software that also lets users pan and zoom around and look up places, streets, airports and geographical features like mountains and lakes, and rivers.

Marble...

• starts up fairly quickly;
  

• downloads with a minimal but useful off-line dataset; it lets users use the software without internet access; Note: higher resolution imagery and maps become unavailable if there is no internet connection.

• seems more responsive than Google Earth.

Marble also provides multiple map views...

• The default a familiar classroom type atlas; which can be changed to
  

• satellite view;

• open street view;

• satellite view at night;

• historical view of circa 1689;

• temperature and precipitation maps.
  

Marbles can also open Google Earth KML maps and GPS data based GPX files.

Visit http://edu.kde.org/marble/ to find out more.

P.S. Marble is available for all major operating systems (Linux/Unix, MS Windows and Mac OS X)