OSX Planet has earned a spot on my list of "essential" third-party software, along with things like Thunderbird and Flip4Mac. And now that v2.0 is finally out, I can enjoy it on my Leopard systems.

Try these settings (Under "OSX Planet Preferences..." General tab) for a practical, eyepopping desktop:

- View Planet: Earth
- With projection: Orthographic
- Centered On: Custom Coordinates
Latitude: 24
Longitude: -90
- Zoom: 50% (for a 1440x900 display)
- Rotate Axis: 23 degrees
- Image Quality: High

This puts the POV above the Gulf of Mexico, giving a nice view of North America. Be sure to enable Clouds and Cloud Data Retrieval under the Visuals tab.