Quote Originally Posted by kraken_42 View Post
I do not have any sort of 3d menu; I believe that is a CS5 Extended only feature.
Oh right, I'd forgotten that there were two editions. I've always had one of the bundles, which always include the Extended version, so I never paid attention to the difference in feature lists.

If you'd like a proper 3d view, where you can look at the globe from different directions, probably the easiest and cheapest solution would be SketchUp. There's a little bit of a learning curve, of course, but making a sphere and mapping a texture to it is pretty basic and should be easy to figure out.

As far as I know, G.Projector will create static images with an orthographic projection, but it doesn't make any actual 3d geometry. Then again, I've only used it once and that wasn't what I was doing with it, so I may be mistaken.