HD View: Earth as Art: Karman Vortices - HD View Beta

Each of these swirling clouds is a result of a meteorological phenomenon known as a Karman vortex. These vortices appeared over Alexander Selkirk Island in the southern Pacific Ocean. Rising precipitously from the surrounding waters, the sland"s highest point is nearly a mile above sea level. As wind-driven clouds encounter this obstacle, they flow around it to form these large, spinning eddies. (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.

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

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Sorry, Microsoft’s HD View is not supported on this computer and browser configuration. The plug-in requires Internet Explorer (6.0, 7.0) or Firefox on Windows XP, Server 2003, or Vista. Please see the technical requirements below.