Google Earth
 

Do you remember that flying dream? It was sooo cool, but you couldn't always fly where you wanted to. Well now, thanks to the wonderful minds at Google, I happily announce Google Earth. Take a heaping helping of the brainiacs at Google, mix in generous portions of too much time on their hands, (no, wait, that's me, sorry), plentiful satellite imagery and map data, top it all off with a double fistfull of computer horsepower, especially video hardware, and serve on a big fat broadband connection, and, Voila! Fly anywhere your heart desires.

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Mega cool....better than a video game....been flying to places ...seeing things from afar..(like me parked at work 3 years ago... and shit like that)..

Been plotting my running routes around then neighborhood. New running route is a quarter mile longer than the old one (thought I was cheating myself last 6 months...) Did a few sanity checks .. measured my sidewalk width...it was right give or take 1/2 a foot..can see my sago palm from 300 ft up....

Wondering why Indiana ( and mass...) is all high res... nothing too spectacular there afaict...might just have to zoom in


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Another favorable review. Just in case you didn't believe me.

I've been playing around with it. It really is incredible. Check out 35o38'14.07"N, 139o45'22.96"E

It works on my machine, but I don't get all of the gee-whiz flying...it just backs off from a spot, blurs, and goes to another spot.

Not enough horsepower.

I've been playing around with it the last couple evenings too. Very cool.

It's so frustrating that so little of the earth is at high res. At least my town is.

It's fun going to all the exotic vaction locations I've been to in my life, and flying around.

Here's a little comparison I made of the mountains north of Innsbruck. The version on the left is generated by Google Earth. The version on the right was taken by me from my parents' apartment in the hills south of Innsbruck.

Google did a pretty good job.
http://photos22.flickr.com/27321231_ac2a2a04d8_o.jpg

Wow, glatt. That's really cool. So, did you enter the address into the Google Earth gadget, then adjust the heading and altitude to correspond to the snapshot to get this comparison?

I actually found the place manually, and then did the adjustments you mention. It was hard to match the existing photograph's perspective perfectly, because my monitor isn't big enough. I couldn't see both images at once. I only spent a few minutes on it. If I spent longer, I probably could have made a better match. The hill in the foreground doesn't match up perfectly with the mountains in the back to be identical to the real photo.

Mostly, I did this to see if Google Earth exaggerates the elevation. So many times it seems like they do. Various mountians I've seen have been so dramatic. Like the hill leading down to the George Washington Bridge in NY. But this picture comparison shows that they don't exaggerate the elevation at all.

Under tools-preferences-view you can set the elevation exageration ratio manually. The default is 1:1. Cool.

What, did you read the instructions?

GoogleEarth rocks for checking out my old childhood haunts in the woods. There is nothing like growing up in the middle of nowhere...and then being able to see em again.

Just did something neat, put in your ancestors town and fly to your town. It gives some perspective on their travel back in the day by blowboat or whatever. Killaloe, Ireland to Grifftopia, PA quite a trip.

I don't get to see my city at all. It looks like some scary pixelated thingy.

Type in Sitka Alaska and see what I mean.

Some parts of the world don't have as good coverage as others (New York City, for example).

I would actually prefer to live in one of those parts of the world with poor coverage.