Desktop Earth

Desktop Earth is a simple-to-use program that displays an interactive wallpaper of the Earth, based on the selected time zone. It can be easily installed and configured.

Once the setup procedure is done, Desktop Earth automatically applies changes to the screen and creates an icon in the system tray area from where you can modify settings.

You can select the time zone to center the image on, or apply your current one at noon, midnight, sunrise or sunset, as well as enable the overlay clouds on the image, for an enhanced effect.

You can adjust the cloud cover thickness, choose the day and night images from drop-down menus (e.g. automatically select according to the data, abundant city lights), as well as add black bars around the image and crop it, if required.

It is also possible to set the update interval as well as to make the wallpaper an active desktop item, which is ideal in a multi-monitor system or as a resizable background picture.

Desktop Earth is very low-demanding when it comes to the CPU and system memory, so it doesn't interfere with the runtime of other active applications. It has a good response time and applies wallpaper changes immediately, without causing the OS to hang, crash or pop up error dialogs. We haven't encountered any issues in our tests.

On the downside, the program has not been updated for a pretty long time. Nevertheless, Desktop Earth provides users with a fun and interactive way of viewing a world map on the screen, depending on the time zone.

Desktop Earth is part of these download collections: Earth Explorer