Earth
The visualization starts with the Earth in it's June 21 orbital orientation ... summer in the northern hemisphere. There are two views, the first is Earth from the side along the path of the orbit. The second view is from the north with respect to the Earth's orbital plane. You can drag in the first view to rotate your view around 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.
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.