If you want to fully experience the work of LANDSAT 7 and you’re a Mac owner, you’re out of luck.
LANDSAT 7 — a joint venture between the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) — takes pictures of the earth and sends the data to the ground stations around the world. Its EarthExplorer utility lets you query and order satellite images through the USGS.
However, if you go online to EarthExplorer as a Mac user, you’ll get the following message: “EarthExplorer has failed to start because it has detected that your browser does not meet the minimum requirements necessary to run EarthExplorer.”
It supports Windows 95/98/NT on both Internet Explorer and Netscape, and supports Irix, Solaris, and Linux if you’re using Netscape 4.06 or better. But Mac users are left out in the cold.
If you’d like to recommend this situation be changed, send an e-mail to earthexplorer@usgs.gov. (Thanks to MacCentral reader Benjamin F. DeClue III for the heads-up on this one.)