Fly from space to find featured national parks using this cool interactive tool!

Eyes on the Earth is a free application, which you can download for use on your computer. It provides an interactive, dynamic and accurate 3D view of our planet using the very latest NASA data, uploaded daily.

Eyes on the Earth home page

Using "Eyes," you can get a space-based view of the entire planet, or ride along with one of NASA's Earth satellites, viewing the planet below as though you too were in orbit hundreds of miles above Earth's surface. And you can zoom into featured locations, like national parks, to take a closer look.

You can also use “Eyes” to

  • examine sea level, carbon dioxide and Antarctic ozone
  • spot volcanic eruptions and forest fires and locate the hottest and coldest places on Earth
  • take a short trip back in time to see how things have been changing

Eyes on National Parks

A special collection of selected national parks will be included in “Eyes,” beginning mid-August 2016. You can zoom from space down to any of these parks to examine it in more detail. Each park will also feature a short description and links to further information.

Featured parks include:

Eyes on the Earth thermal page
  • Assateague Island National Seashore
  • Biscayne National Park
  • Cape Lookout National Seashore
  • Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve
  • Death Valley National Park
  • Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve
  • Glacier National Park
  • Isle Royale National Park
  • Lassen Volcanic National Park
  • Rio Grande Wild and Scenic River
  • White Sands National Monument
  • (others may be added in future)

With “Eyes,” you can see how a park compares to surrounding areas, and consider all sorts of questions, such as,

Is the sea level in coastal areas changing?
Has the average surface temperature of a region increased or decreased?
Have there been any recent volcanic eruptions or forest fires?
Have there been any of these kinds of changes near any of the featured parks?

Download and install the program at https://eyes.nasa.gov/eyes-on-the-earth.html

Once the program is installed, go to https://eyes.nasa.gov/eyes-on-the-earth.html and launch the program, or launch from your computer.

You must be connected to the internet in order for the program to function.
“Eyes” runs on both Macintosh (OSX 10.8+) and Windows (7+) operating systems.