0.7a Beta (Apr/99)	Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose apedescended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. Douglas Adams. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

What is it?

WinEarth (home or mirror) is a Windows 9x/NT 3D screen saver, which displays our planet as it is currently seen from space with correct shading and stars. It was inspired by Unix's X-Earth, but it is not a port -- WinEarth was written completely from scratch with OpenGL.

Current version is 0.7a beta (Apr/99). It is released mainly for testing purpose.

WinEarth is distributed as a freeware.

You can choose the position of camera relative to Sun, ambient/diffuse light intensity, number of stars (3000 max.), their brightness, and interval of image updating (4 min equals 1 degree of Earth's rotation).

Installation

• Check if you have VB 6 run-time libraries installed - look in C:\Windows\system (or C:\Winnt\system32 under NT) folder for a file msvbm60.dll. If you have one proceed to the next step, overwise download vbrun60.zip (1M), unzip it and run vbrun60.exe. Reboot computer if prompted.
• Check if you have OpenGL libraries from SGI installed - look in C:\Windows\system (or C:\Winnt\system32 under NT) folder for files opengl.dll, glu.dll and glut.dll. If you have them proceed to the next step, overwise download opengldlls.zip (756K) and unzip it to C:\Windows\system (or C:\Winnt\system32 under NT) folder.
• Download winearth07a.zip (323K) and unzip it to  to C:\Windows\system (or C:\Winnt\system32 under NT) folder.
• Choose menu command Start=>Settings=>Control Panel=>Display=>Screen Saver and choose WinEarth from drop-down list.

Warning: WinEarth is not a traditional screen saver which exits after mouse move or key press. Arrow key press moves camera. Press non-arrow key or click a mouse to exit.

Coming soon

I plan to add the following features:

• Moon.
• Planets
• Stars names as tooltips.
• Constellations.
• Zoom.
• Grid.
• User-defined list of cities visible on Earth.
• Trajectory chooser.
• Sun.
• Anything else?

After all that, WinEarth will be released as a set of three programs: a separate application, which draws directly on desktop behind all open windows and icons, an ActiveX control, embedable to web-pages and applications, and a screen saver.

(c) 1999 Damir Rakityansky.