Earth
The visualization starts with the Earth in it's June 21 orbital orientation ... summer in the northern hemisphere. Click the mouse to to rotate your view around Earth. The orbital path indicator is not working correctly when your point-of-view is near the Earth. You can select four different times of year and display either a terrain map or a map of monthly mean temperatures.
Getting a WebGL-enabled browser
You need a WebGL-enabled browser to explore this visualization. Beta releases of Chrome for Mac OS X and Windows and the WebKit nightly beta release for Mac OS X appear to work best.
Credits
Earth texture from the European Space Agency/Envisat.
The Milky Way galaxy texture from Gigagalaxy Zoom: Milky Way Panorama, by ESO/S. Brunier.
Temperature map images adapted from the CDC Derived NCEP Reanalysis Products Surface Level Data produced by the Physical Science Division at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory.
The Earth's city lights image was adapted from the Earth's City Lights section on NASA's Visible Earth project.
Outline image of continents adapted from Earth_MWDB1 gif image produced by the Panoply Data Viewer Project at National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Source Code
Some of the JavaScript source code:
View the rest of the code on github.