PlanetX

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A 3D globe inside QGIS. PlanetX version 1.41.0.

The globe opens in its own window and shows the whole Earth with terrain and atmosphere, from space down to single streets.

PlanetX Lite is the PlanetX globe without QGIS, a separate program.

The plugin is free and open source. Support development (Russian bank cards via SBP)

Features

• Satellite imagery. By default the globe shows Esri World Imagery as an example base map. The Base map group of the Layers section switches it to OpenStreetMap or to XYZ Tiles connections from the QGIS browser. A tile source of your own is added by its address in any form, the window shows a test mosaic and finds the most detailed level itself.
• Terrain. Mountains and valleys are three-dimensional, slopes are shaded by light from the north-west. Vertical exaggeration is set in the view properties. The camera stays at least 50 m above the terrain.
• Map sheet designation. The globe menu gives map sheet numbers at the point. They are IMW 1:1,000,000, the Russian designation down to 1:200,000, the NATO JOG 1:250,000 sheet and the MGRS square. Russian State Geological Map sheets use the same numbers.
• Atmosphere. A blue glow surrounds the planet. From a low altitude the sky is visible at the horizon, and distant mountains fade into haze.
• Grid, stars, clouds. A coordinate grid with labels, the equator, tropics and polar circles in yellow. The stars and the Milky Way stand at their places in the sky. Clouds come from NASA imagery of the last complete day. Land and sea temperature from NASA data colours the globe, the scale in degrees is in the corner of the view.
• 3D buildings. OpenStreetMap buildings from OpenFreeMap tiles rise as blocks when the camera is closer than 6 km to the ground. The height comes from OpenStreetMap or from the number of floors.
• Sun. Terrain and buildings are lit by the position of the sun at the time slider time or by the clock, the night side of the Earth is dark.
• Other bodies. The Body icon on the icon bar puts Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, its moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, the moons of Saturn from Mimas to Iapetus, Ceres or Vesta in place of the Earth. The imagery comes from global NASA and USGS mosaics. Mars terrain is built from MOLA heights, Moon terrain from LOLA heights. Navigation, grid, ruler, places, tours, view snapshots and scenes work on any body. A place remembers its body.
• Starry sky. The Body icon also opens the sky from the centre of the celestial sphere. It shows the Milky Way, stars, constellation lines and names, the Sun, the Moon and the planets at the chosen time. Zoomed in, the sky shows the detailed NASA sky map and, closer, DSS survey images with nebulae and galaxies. Deep-sky objects are labelled, a click opens a card, and the Search bar finds them by designation or name.
• Inside the Earth. The terrain shows sea and ocean depths under semi-transparent water. The Earthquakes layer shows the foci of the last 30 days from the USGS feed at their depth. The Earth cutaway layer removes a sector, its faces show the CRUST1.0 crust, the mantle and core of the PREM model and the Slab2 subducting slabs. The corners of the sector can be dragged with the mouse. The Section down… item in the menu of a path shows a section of the Earth along the path in its own window and as a wall on the globe. The SEISGLOB2 tomography colours the mantle on the faces by the seismic wave speed.
• Geophysics. Magnetic poles and declination lines since 1590, EMAG2v3 magnetic anomalies, XGM2019e gravity and Bouguer anomalies, the EGM2008 geoid, ocean floor age, heat flow, lithospheric plate motion and Holocene volcanoes. A click on the globe shows the value at the point.
• Geology, water and soils. The Macrostrat geological map, the GLiM lithological map, GEM active faults, earthquakes since 1904 from the ISC-GEM catalogue, ESA WorldCover land cover, Fields of the World field boundaries, JRC surface water occurrence and transitions 1984-2021 and SoilGrids soil properties. A click shows the class or the value at the point.
• Subsurface mode. Drill holes along their survey, bed roofs, sections with images and tunnels from project layers go under the globe surface with the QGIS style and labels. The surface becomes transparent, a polygon of My Places cuts a block, the camera goes underground. The Permian deposits and Vegas Loop tunnels demos show the mode.
• Weather. The Weather category of the catalogue shows air temperature, precipitation, wind and clouds of the NOAA GFS model at the moment of the time slider. It covers a forecast up to 16 days and the past.
• Wikipedia nearby. Labels of Wikipedia articles about places near the view. A click opens the first paragraph of the article, the link and the Explain this question to the assistant.
• NASA themes. The Planet of Fire, Planet of Water, Planet of Air and Land and Life groups of the catalogue show 22 NASA GIBS rasters by date - smoke, carbon monoxide, precipitation, snow, ice, gases, vegetation, night lights. The time slider sets the day of a theme. The Add data button of the Layers section opens the catalogue, each map has a preview and a description. A comparison swipe shows a theme for two days side by side.
• Imagery archive. The Esri Wayback map shows past releases of the Esri World Imagery base map since 2014. The time slider selects a release, the steps go through the releases in which the image at the centre of the view changed, the swipe compares two releases. Point details names the capture date, the provider and the resolution of the image.
• Recognition. One window for the classes of a site. The source is Sentinel-2 images that the window finds and loads itself, a project raster, the globe basemap or AlphaEarth embeddings. Classes are computed by own samples - points and outlines on the globe, by image colors, by an outlined sample or by task rules - forests and clear-cuts, fields, water, overgrown fields by spring and autumn images over 4 years. The result is a class raster and smoothed polygons without gaps or overlaps, roads, rivers and shelterbelts come out as center lines.
• Land change. AlphaEarth Foundations embeddings, 10 m cells for each year of 2017-2025, show where the land changed between two years - construction, logging, quarries, floods. The result goes to the QGIS project as a raster.
• Paleogeography. The Paleogeography layer shows land relief and sea depths of the past, up to 540 million years ago, after the PALEOMAP PaleoDEM maps. A slider in the corner of the view sets the age.
• Assistant. A conversation window with an AI model - Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, OpenRouter models or an own model through Ollama. The model controls the globe on a request in words - flights, Layers rows, sections, point and earthquake information. A request can also be typed in the Search field. A button by the Search field makes places from a description, for example "the voyage of Columbus", with the dates of the events. The model proposes placemarks as a KML document, they are written after confirmation. OpenRouter with free models is chosen by default, its key is free. Ollama works without a key.
• Left panel. The sections Places and Layers collapse with a click on the header.
• Layers section. One list of everything on the globe - the base map and relief with choice menus, layers that are on, the vector base groups Borders and names, Transport and Nature and the QGIS project group. A row takes one line, its ⋯ menu sets the opacity, saves to the QGIS project or removes the layer. Check boxes take effect at once.
• Labels. Labels stay upright at any turn and tilt and do not overlap. A place behind a mountain or beyond the horizon is not labelled. The label language follows QGIS or is chosen in the view properties.
• Project layers. Vector and raster layers of the project lie on the globe in the QGIS map order. A check mark in the QGIS project section shows a layer on the globe and leaves the map unchanged. Labels of vector layers stay level like city names, with the text and colour of the layer labels in QGIS. A swipe compares layers - one layer left of it, another right of it.

Controls

• Grab the Earth. Drag the Earth with the left mouse button. After release it keeps rotating by inertia.
• Zoom to the cursor. The wheel zooms to the point under the cursor, and the point stays in place.
• Turn and tilt. The middle button or Shift with the left button turns and tilts the view.
• Mouse and keys. A left double click flies to the point and zooms in, a right double click zooms out. Dragging with the right button up zooms in, down zooms out. Ctrl with the left button moves the view along the screen without turning it, Ctrl and Shift with the left button look around, the eye stays in place. Arrows move the view, with Shift they turn and tilt, with Ctrl they look around. PageUp and PageDown zoom, N puts north up, U looks straight down, R does both, Space stops.
• On-screen controls. The top right corner of the view holds the compass ring, the look and move sticks and the height slider with plus and minus buttons.
• Search. Type a place name in the Search field at the top left, for example Perm, or coordinates in degrees, for example 58.0105, 56.2294. The camera flies there. Over long distances it rises and then lands smoothly. The place found is marked with a red pin. If several places are found, the others are listed below the field. Clearing the field removes the pin and closes the list.
• Refresh. The globe refreshes by itself after a change of the base map, terrain exaggeration and project layers. If automatic refresh is switched off in the view properties, the changes appear after the Refresh button in the corner of the view.
• Map synchronization. The link button in the corner of the view ties the globe to the QGIS map window. The map leads the globe, the globe leads the map or both follow each other, as chosen in the view properties. Any map coordinate system works.
• Save view. The Save view button in the corner of the view puts a placemark at the look-at point. A double click on it restores the height, heading and tilt of the globe.
• View snapshot. The snapshot button in the corner of the view saves the view to PNG or JPEG, larger than the window if needed. The globe loads detailed tiles for that size, the source credits sit in the corner of the snapshot.
• View to layout. The layout button puts the view as a fixed picture into a QGIS layout, an existing or a new one. The snapshot size follows the picture size on the page and the output resolution of the layout. The picture is embedded in the project.
• Layer transparency. The menu of a project layer in the globe list changes the transparency of the QGIS layer with a slider and opens the layer properties. The transparency is shared with the map.
• Selection. Features selected on the QGIS map are highlighted on the globe, features found by a click on the globe are selected on the map.
• Ruler. Line, path, polygon and circle by clicks on the globe. Length, perimeter and area on the WGS84 ellipsoid, ground length and heading, a 3D path and a 3D polygon over roofs and walls of buildings. Points are dragged with the mouse. The elevation profile of a path shows ascent and slopes. The measurement is saved to My Places.
• Terrain analysis. The Slope and Aspect rows colour the surface of the Earth, Mars and the Moon by slope steepness and by compass direction. Viewshed from a point placemark shows the places seen from it and those hidden by the terrain. Insolation shows the hours of direct sunlight per day for chosen dates, with mountain shadows. Flooding fills everything below a water level that the water reaches from a point, the level changes with a slider. Water flow from a point gives the flow line and the catchment with the main stream, the stream network and the catchment of a placemark. Sea level rises or falls over the whole globe. Slope, aspect, peaks and pits of an area around a point go to the QGIS project and My Places.
• Coordinates. Degrees, degrees-minutes-seconds, UTM or MGRS in the status line, search understands all four.
• My Places. Placemarks, paths and polygons are drawn by clicks on the globe. They, saved views and measurements sit in the My Places folder of the Places section. The places file is shared by the QGIS profile, so places are visible in any project. A double click on a place or folder flies there. A folder has a description, a view of its own and can show its contents as option buttons, with one place of the folder on the globe.
• Tour. Play tour in the menu of My Places or any of its folders flies over the checked places in the list order, along a path the camera travels the line. Places and folders are rearranged by dragging. The bar under the time slider pauses the tour, steps between stops and repeats the tour in a loop. It records the tour to an MP4 video right away or as PNG frames of any size for editing. The record button records a tour from the screen.
• Placemark time. A placemark can have a moment or an interval. The time slider opens with a button on the icon bar and hides placemarks outside the interval.
• Demo. The icon with an academic cap opens prepared scenes with places and tours. They show Perm, Boca Chica and the Japan Trench with a section across the subduction zone on the Earth, landing sites on Mars and the Moon, constellations and bright objects in the sky.
• Scenes. The whole view - camera, time, layers, settings and a places folder with its tour - saves to a file and opens on another computer.
• Tracks. A point layer with a time field shows as growing paths of its objects along the time slider of the globe. The camera can follow along the motion. A project layer with QGIS time shows within the range of the same slider.
• Satellites. The Satellites layer shows stations, navigation, weather, geostationary and other satellites from CelesTrak elements for the moment of the time slider or by the clock. The selected satellite shows its orbit loop and ground track, the camera can follow it. The time slider runs at clock speeds up to a day per second, the line between day and night and the satellites move with it.
• Route. Route start and Route end in the globe menu build a path by OpenStreetMap roads by car or on foot. The path with the length and travel time goes into My Places. The points lie up to 50 km apart.
• Place properties. Name, description, icon, colors, time, height above ground and extending to the ground. A path becomes a wall, a polygon a block.
• KML and KMZ. KML and KMZ files, including Google Earth ones, open into My Places with folders, styles and placemark views. A folder saves to KMZ or KML.
• Image overlays. A ground overlay by a box or four corners, a photo with a camera and a screen overlay, as in Google Earth. The image is kept in the places file or as a link to a file or address. A ground overlay goes into the QGIS project as a GeoTIFF layer.
• Point clouds. LAS, LAZ and COPC layers of the project, for example a drone survey, stand on the globe as points at their elevations. The colour follows the survey image, the class, the height or the intensity, only ground points can be kept. PDAL shipped with QGIS is needed.
• OpenAerialMap images. Open drone and aerial images in the view go to the project as layers with the licence of each image.
• Own terrain. A height raster of the project, for example a quarry survey, becomes the globe terrain within its extent, more detailed than the common terrain, down to the raster pixel.
• Copy and paste. Places and folders are copied to the clipboard as KML text and pasted back, also after editing in a text editor and from Google Earth.
• Identify features. In the Identify features mode a click on the globe shows the coordinates and elevation of the point and the features of the project layers checked on the globe.

The View properties icon on the icon bar opens the view properties. Tiles come through the QGIS network settings and cache. The About button in the globe window lists the controls and the data sources.

Everything is described in detail in the manual - doc/MANUAL.en.md. A PDF manual with pictures ships with the plugin and opens from the About window.

Installation

In QGIS open Plugins → Manage and Install Plugins, find PlanetX and install it. The globe opens with the button on the PlanetX toolbar or from Web → PlanetX.

Telegram bot

The @PlanetXQgisBot bot finds sections of the manuals of PlanetX and the other plugins of the line for a question, for example "how to add a 3D model". The /latest command shows the latest release of PlanetX, Isoliner, Isoliner3D, Topoliner, Routeliner or Repoliner with a link to the archive, /report passes a bug report or a wish to the developers. Posts about plugin releases appear in the @qgis_isolines channel.

Requirements

• QGIS 3.36 or newer, QGIS 4 included. Tested on QGIS 3.36 with Qt 5 and on QGIS 4.0 with Qt 6.
• A graphics card with OpenGL 3.3.
• The PyOpenGL Python module. QGIS builds for Windows include it.

Sources

Satellite imagery is Esri World Imagery, credited to Esri, Vantor, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User Community. Esri sets the terms of use.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, terms of use. Vector tiles and 3D buildings come from OpenFreeMap.

Terrain comes from Mapzen Terrain Tiles, data from SRTM, GMTED, ETOPO1 and other sources.

Clouds come from NASA GIBS, VIIRS imagery. Temperature comes from NASA GIBS, MODIS and GHRSST MUR. Stars come from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue. The Milky Way comes from NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, Gaia DR2 - ESA/Gaia/DPAC. Close-up sky images come from the Digitized Sky Survey (STScI/NASA) through the CDS HiPS service. Deep-sky objects come from the OpenNGC catalogue, CC BY-SA 4.0, other names from the CDS Sesame service.

Mars imagery - NASA, USGS, Viking MDIM2.1, tiles of OpenPlanetaryMap. Moon imagery - NASA, GSFC, Arizona State University, LRO LROC WAC, USGS. Mars heights come from NASA MGS MOLA, Moon heights from NASA LRO LOLA, both via USGS Astrogeology. Imagery of other bodies comes from global mosaics of USGS Astrogeology and NASA Photojournal, made from MESSENGER, Magellan, Galileo, Voyager, Cassini and Dawn data. Constellations and star names come from d3-celestial, © Olaf Frohn. Planet positions are computed from JPL orbital elements.

Data sources and their terms of use are described in doc/SOURCES.md, in Russian.

Landsat 1-5 MSS images in the images window were added after a discussion with Nadezhda (github.com/nadiopt-cell), the author of QGIS plugins for loading satellite images.

Developed with the support of Inform++ LLC (https://www.informpp.ru/). License GNU GPL version 3.