Earth Explorer

The world is a large place and there are many interesting locations to see. If your geography skills need improvement, you can use Earth Explorer to find more than 50.000 cities, in 270 countries. It uses a 3D globe to provide satellite imagery, as well as shaded relief topographic imagery. The application places various controls to navigate from one place to another, measure distances and more. What's more, Earth Explorer provides support for realtime satellite map GPS navigation.

The application can be installed on any Windows platform, including XP, Vista and Windows 7. You can use the application free of charge, only during a 30-day trial period. The setup package is about 10 MB large and the installation process is straightforward.

You can use different tools to grab and rotate the globe or click on a location to center on it. Zooming in or out is possible as well and it can be done in different ways. A series of options, located on the toolbar, will display the boundaries between countries and their counties or regions, names for countries, cities and islands and information about earthquakes.

A table of contents, placed on the right side of the interface, contains various details for each country. The information includes a country's full name, capital, coordinates (longitude and latitude), population, GPD and surface area. You may click different navigation tabs, above the same table of contents, to find information about cities, islands and earthquakes. If you select a listed item, the map will center on its location instantly. Alternatively, you may use a search function to find specific countries, cities, islands or custom placemarks.

The earthquakes feature is quite simple, but very interesting. If you enable it, the application will place countless dots on the map, to pinpoint the locations of recorded earthquakes (since 1973). In addition, Earth Explorer comes with a distance calculator, which you can use with any two points on the globe. The application also lets you mark any location and illustrate paths between two or more places.