stumbled across this today, you will probably have seen it before but you can create some really stunning images with it:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/uncgi/Earth
You enter latitude/longitude of an area you want to look at, and a few other things such as type of map, whether you want cloud cover and what time you want to look at, and it produces a stitched image of what that view looks like from outer space.
my current desktop:
http://davestones.com/sunset.jpg