Have you tried your hand on Bhuvan ,which is India’s ISRO’s answer to Google Earth. Well ,its still in beta phase so just don’t think that it will replace Google earth soon in India. But I hope Bhuvan have some great potential specially for Indian users. I registered in the site today and installed the plugin which of 10 mb size. Well ,it works only in IE 6 and above so if you dont use IE ,you have to revert back to IE and use the Bhuvan out there.

So what is Bhuvan all about ? Bhuvan is a web based mapping tool just like Google Earth .It also provides tools for measuring, drawing, saving, printing and visualizing thematic information. The resolutions currently on offer are good enough to view a vehicle moving on a road quite clearly.

According to the Bhuvan FAQs:

Bhuvan is a geoportal that provides medium to high resolution satellite imagery of virtually the entire India over the internet. You can “fly” around using mouse and keyboard on a simple desktop computer with virtual globe in front draped with IRS images over Indian region. Many other features are built in, including 3D terrain and information on many thematic data.

You require the Bhuvan Plug-in which can be downloaded from the Bhuvan website after registration and you will also need DirectX9 or higher version (www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/) for installing the plug-in. Please note that the Bhuvan Plug-in can be installed with administrative privileges only.

Following the types which you will see on Bhuvan:

• Satellite imagery (LISS III , LISS IV along with metadata and  Multi- temporal Data from OCM & AWiFS)
• Value added information (NADAMS – National Agricultural Drought Monitoring System), Output of flood studies for certain areas,
• Thematic information  (Wastelands, Soils, watershed,water resources related maps)
• Base layers ( administrative boundaries, transport layers, water bodies, etc)
• Census information
• Metadata

Can I use Bhuvan if I don’t have a fast internet connection?
Yes. Bhuvan is designed to be as bandwidth-friendly as possible. However, it is dependent on continuously downloading a large amount of imagery. Consequently, the faster your connection, the better the program will perform. If you have a slow connection, Bhuvan will download imagery correspondingly slowly, but it will (eventually) download everything at the maximum available resolution.  Depending on the number of concurrent users on over servers and the kind of bandwidth at client end the ultimate speed of visualisation will be decided.  This is a beta release, however with more learnings we will be able to make things more comfortable for all types of users.

Can I use Bhuvan if I’m not connected to the internet?
No. You will have to be connected to Internet for using Bhuvan.

How current is the imagery in Bhuvan?

Bhuvan portal does NOT display data in real-time. The images you see are a combination of satellite imagery from various IRS sensors taken (generally) sometime within the last three years during different seasons. Bhuvan, on release, contains IRS satellite images from OCM, AWifs, LISS 3, and LISS 4 sensor images and will be added with more data from time to time. Bhuvan is constantly updating its database to use more recent and higher resolution images. You can explore the metadata content to determine when exactly a specific area was imaged, but you may be able to use landmarks to generalize a date range if you are familiar with the area.

Well,I found Bhuvan interesting, but the only problem I faced was my internet explorer 8 was not responding some times. If you want to try Google earth then you might try Google Earth for Windows 7 .

You can also check some Windows 7 related posts :

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If you have any computer related problem, you can ask it at our Question & Answer portal and our experts will answer your queries.

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