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Previous Next Soaring, snow-capped peaks and ridges of the eastern Himalaya Mountains create an irregular white-on-red patchwork between major rivers in southwestern China. The Himalayas are made up of three parallel mountain ranges that together extend more than 2,900 kilometers. The red color reflects wavelengths detected by the Landsat 7 satellite. (USGS/NASA)
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  SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Operating system: Only Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista RC1 or later are supported at this time.

Web browser: IE6, IE7, Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2.0

Memory: 256 MB of memory is a bare minimum; 1GB recommended.

Disk: This technology preview uses almost no disk space. The ActiveX control is less than 500KB in size, and no local disk storage is used when the code is running.

Graphics: Graphics cards that support DirectX 9. If your card has below 32MB of memory you may only be able to run one instance of HD View. HD View may run on cards that do not meet this requirement, but performance may be poor and functionality may be impaired.

  HD View Instructions

Zoom:  Use mouse scroll wheel or "+" and "-" keys to zoom in or out.

Navigate:  Click and drag to navigate the image.

Modes:  Click the "hand" icon in the upper right of the image to change the image navigation modes.

Microsoft Research HD View

HD View is a viewer developed by Microsoft Research's Interactive Visual Media group to aid in display and interaction with high resolution images.

Recent advances have led to the creation of images containing billions of pixels. Since monitors typically contain only 1 million to 2 million pixels, it is only possible to actually see 1/1000th of such image data at once. HD View allows you to explore the richness and detail available in modern digital images.

The version of HD View you are using is a beta, so it may or may not run on your computer system.

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Slide show
  Earth as art
Click through a collection of beautiful Earth imagery captured from orbit by the Landsat 7 satellte.

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