Xplanet
xplanet is a renderer for planetary and solar system images, capable of producing various types of graphics depicting the solar system. It is normally used to create computer wallpapers, which may be updated with the latest cloud maps or the regions of Earth which are in sunlight.
Flat maps xplanet can be used to produce projected maps of any planet (but typically Earth), for example mollweide images which show the whole earth at once, or mercator projections with a rectangular appearance suitable for filling the screen. It is possible to overlay clouds, text (such as the location of recent events) onto these maps, and one popular option is the shading of areas currently in local nighttime.
Planetary images xplanet can also be used to render more general views of objects in the solar system, for example Earth from the moon. In recent versions, xplanet is accurate enough to depict eclipses, and some of the example images show Jupiter's moons casting their eclipse onto the planet.
Technical xplanet runs on UNIX-like systems such as Linux (it was derived from xearth, an ancient (in computer terms) unix program), and is also available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. It can be set to either generate a wallpaper, to save the resulting image to a file (JPEG, etc.), or to produce textual output detailing the locations of various objects. Configuration is done by textfile with a good helpfile, and the Windows version has a simple editor to help with updating the configurations.
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