Google Earth lets us fly on the Moon and Mars!

And that scientifically concludes how distorted and unnatural things seems to be from an egoistic "we are the center of the world" view

Looks like Celestia program: http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
But I am not sure.

Agree with #2 -- if the ancient astronomers had seen this, they'd immediately recognize the heliocentric pattern.

Cool software! Definitely not from Google.

On a sort of unrelated but connected point of view, does anyone know how much of our planet is covered and indeed recorded by satellite images.

I have no delusions about the vastness of our oceans compared to our land mass but it occurred to me that from space an extremely large area of the planet is visible (all of it if you wait for it to revolve)I wondered when we have a situation where a ship, boat, plane, whatever is "Lost at sea" why there is not the facility to look at a particular area that the craft is likely to be in and view say a flair or indeed see the actual aircraft actually going down.

This is probably a really stupid question and I apologise in advance of any sarcastic replies. My guess is we are talking 'Out of this world' amounts of recording space required. But wouldn't it be a great if we could.

#5 Unfortunately your question isn't very concise but I gather you are trying to figure out why they can't find the lost Malaysian airliner using satellite imagery? There are better experts than me that could answer your question. Randall Munroe of www.xkcd.com is probably one of the most accessible. My semi-educated guess is that every inch of the earth gets swept by an imaging satellite at least once per 24 hour cycle.

That said in terms of actually spotting a lost ship or plane in a satellite image at least three factors make the job exceedingly difficult. Those factors are timing, image resolution, and image analysis or spotting.

Timing: If the plane isn't within the frame of the satellite lens when the picture is taken then you won't see it. Everybody has gone to Google Earth and looked at their house to see if your car was in the driveway when the picture was taken.

Image Resolution: Not all satellite images can be zoomed in far enough to gather meaningful details. Images taken of the ocean and other barren areas are usually of low resolution. Satellites can be retasked but unfortunately no high res images were being taken of the target search area until after the plane was reported missing. A flare would be damn near impossible to spot in a satellite image not just because of timing and resolution but also because of...

Image analysis or Spotting: Just like with security camera footage nobody looks at satellite images unless they have some expectation of finding something. It takes an actual human to look at the image to see if anything is there. Look at how badly facial recognition works on many cameras and think how likely is it that a computer can find a plane in clouds or on the water.
http://www.ryot.org/you-wont-believe-how-many-satellites-are-orbiting-earth-right-now/620549

#7 Thank you very much for the information. I wasn't thinking especially of the Malaysian aircraft but it seems more and more there are incidents of disabled boats, yachts and the like, that are often found 'by chance' or not at all.

It seems to me that the costs involved in sending out ship after ship and diverting others to areas looking for these crafts (not to mention the human loss and high insurance pay outs) could be better spent or perhaps I should say better diploid by improving the satellite surveillance of at least some of our oceans. I'm sure that statistics would be able to highlight which ones are most populated with problems as a place to start.

Surly (and from my simple idealism) if a single sweep of the entire planet is made once every 24 hours then this could be increased to twice, three, four times? or concentrated on specific areas?

Maybe then someone needs to invent a flair that stays illuminated in the night sky for half an hour or more. I'll get on to it

The problem with your thought process is one that many people have. You think space is unlimited. But space is getting crowded. The risk of collisions is going up. Check out the link in my previous post. Satellite images are not a practical solution to the problem of keeping track of planes and boats in the barren wastes of the world. However there are better solutions. A better solution would be to revise the way planes and boats record and report data especially location data. Instead of recording data and holding it in an onboard recorder they could continually beam data to the closest collection station. This would require setting up a world wide network of interopperable recording stations. It could also serve to update a grossly outdated air traffic control system. There are many barriers both political and financial but the technology exists.

Some people reading this might conclude that vehicles could use satellite communications to continuously report location data but again we get into the problem of not enough satellites, in this case communication satellites. Google does however have a pretty good solution in the works. One of Googles projects is using balloons to expand internet access. Now to be clear their balloons would work a bit more like blimps but the principle is sound. Strategically placed unmanned communications balloons could collect and relay location data for planes and boats traveling along typical flight paths or shipping lanes.

So if you wanted something to work on there is a lot of analysis to be done to figure how all that could work out. Or if you wanted to work on the emergency signaling issue maybe build a better signal device like a bouy or a drone that could be deployed in an emergency.

A fool is known by the multitude of his words...