Google Earth 5 is impressive - its allows movies to be made in minutes that before would of taken a couple of days in a high end 3d package. The movie below was captured in real-time using the Sun Cycle combined with NASA's night time imagery.
The addition of day time imagery to the clip would be a simple case of re-recording using a fixed flightpath and superimposing with the standard earth view. However, we really like the lighting effects of the night cycle combined with the city lights thus the rough cut below:
Google Earth NASA Night from digitalurban on Vimeo.
As a contrast our movie of population density in the UK, below, was visualized in After Effects and took around 3 hours to complete. If we had imported it into Google Earth we could of gained a similar effect in a few minutes.
Visualising Data: UK Population One Light per 200 People from digitalurban on Vimeo.
Music is by a rather good unsigned band - Lemonade Joe.
