Blue Planet For Mac

Blue Planet is a nifty Mac OS X application designed to display a realistic map on your desktop background. The great part is that Blue Planet simulates the current movement of the light across the earth and transposes it on your desktop map.

The application provides high-quality satellite imagery of our planet. Moreover, you can choose between 4 different daylight maps: NASA Blue Marble, NASA Blue Marble Next Generation, Natural Earth and Planet Pixel Emporium. A variety of options are also available in the Preferences window.

Setting up Blue Planet is a piece of cake and its control panel can be accessed via a menu bar item. Besides providing access to the preferences, the menu bar panel also enables you to track the current time, hide the desktop icons and take a screenshot.

In the preferences, you have a variety of options at your disposal: displaying your location, choosing the monitor on which you want to show the map, selecting the map size (fill screen or fit to screen) and placement (behind or in front of Desktop icons).

The second set of options allow you to choose the map type from the ones that were just mentioned. An extra options is to center the map on your time zone. What’s more, a series of special options in the “Time Lapse” tab allow you to show the satellite images of Earth from a specific time in the past.

Overall, the Blue Planet app is a great way to monitor the Earth’s day / night cycle and to view when your city will be covered in darkness or light. If you love satellite images of Earth and like having them on your desktop, you might like this app, too.