A 3D globe in its own window inside QGIS. The whole Earth is shown
from space down to single streets, with terrain relief and hill
shading, a glowing atmosphere around the planet and sky at the
horizon. Esri World Imagery opens by default as an example base map.
It can be switched to OpenStreetMap or any XYZ Tiles connection set
up in QGIS.
The Layers panel adds borders, place names,
water names, roads with their numbers, railways, airports, rivers,
lakes, peaks and protected areas from OpenFreeMap vector tiles,
a coordinate grid, stars with the Milky Way, clouds and land and
sea temperature from NASA GIBS. 3D buildings from
OpenStreetMap rise from the ground near the camera.
The ruler measures ground length and heading, the elevation
profile of a path shows ascent and slopes. Coordinates show
in degrees, degrees-minutes-seconds, UTM or MGRS. Places
have icons and a time of their own with a time slider,
and a tour can be recorded from the screen.
The Sun row
lights terrain and buildings by the position of the sun with
a dark night side, the 3D path and 3D polygon of the ruler
measure over roofs and walls of buildings.
The Body icon puts the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, the
Galilean moons, seven moons of Saturn, Ceres or Vesta in place of
the Earth, with global NASA and USGS imagery and terrain of Mars
and the Moon from MOLA and LOLA heights, and opens the starry sky seen from the
centre of the celestial sphere: the Milky Way, stars,
constellation lines and names, the Sun, the Moon and the planets
at the chosen time. The Demo icon with an academic cap opens
prepared scenes: Perm, Boca Chica and the Japan Trench with a
section across the subduction zone on the Earth, landing sites
on Mars and the Moon, Jezero crater on Mars, constellations and bright objects in the
sky.
Labels stay upright, do not overlap and hide behind mountains and
the horizon. The label language follows QGIS or is chosen from
15 languages and local names.
Layers of the current project, vector and raster, lie on the globe
in the map order of QGIS, labels of vector layers stay level like
city names.
Drag the Earth with the left mouse
button, it keeps rotating by inertia after release. The wheel zooms
to the point under the cursor, the middle button or Shift with the
left button turns and tilts the view. A double click zooms to a
point, the right button zooms, Ctrl looks around, arrows, PageUp,
PageDown, N, U and R move the view. The compass ring,
look and move sticks and the height slider stay in the corner of
the view as a faint outline. The globe follows the QGIS map window or leads it, in any
map coordinate system. A click in the Identify mode lists the
features of the project layers under the point and selects them on
the map, selection on the map shows on the globe.
My Places keep placemarks, paths, polygons and
measurements in a shared file of the QGIS profile. They are drawn
by clicks on the globe. The ruler measures lines, paths,
polygons and circles on the WGS84 ellipsoid. Save view puts a
placemark that restores the height, heading and tilt. Tours fly
over My Places and along paths. A snapshot of the view goes to a
file or into a QGIS layout. KML and KMZ open into My Places and a
folder saves back to KML. Places rise above the ground and extend
to it as walls and blocks. Point layers with a time field show as
growing tracks along the QGIS Temporal Controller. A scene saves
the whole view to a file, a tour records to PNG frames.
Type a place name or coordinates in the Search field and the
camera flies there smoothly, the place found gets a red pin.
A PDF manual with pictures in Russian and English opens from the
About window.
Requires OpenGL 3.3 and PyOpenGL, which ships with QGIS on Windows.
Tested on QGIS 3.36 (Qt 5) and 4.0 (Qt 6).
Imagery: Esri, Vantor, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User
Community. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, vector tiles
OpenFreeMap. Terrain: Mapzen Terrain Tiles (SRTM, GMTED, ETOPO1
and other sources). Clouds: NASA GIBS, VIIRS. Stars: Yale Bright
Star Catalogue. Milky Way: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Scientific Visualization Studio, Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC.
Mars: NASA, USGS, Viking MDIM2.1. Moon: USGS, LRO LOLA. Tiles of
both: OpenPlanetaryMap. Mars heights: NASA MGS MOLA MEGDR. Moon
heights: NASA LRO LOLA GDR. Other bodies: global mosaics of USGS
Astrogeology and NASA Photojournal from MESSENGER, Magellan,
Galileo, Voyager, Cassini and Dawn data. Constellations and star names:
d3-celestial, © Olaf Frohn. Planets: JPL orbital elements.
Landsat 1-5 MSS images were added after a discussion with Nadezhda
(https://github.com/nadiopt-cell), the author of QGIS plugins for
loading satellite images.
Developed with the support of Inform++ LLC (https://www.informpp.ru/).