The best of Google Earth for July 2016
by Timothy Whitehead on Jul.29, 2016, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA
Google has been adding new imagery to Google Earth, but has not updated historical imagery for over a month, so we are unable to do maps of the new imagery or see any of the added imagery that is not in the default layer.
We had a look at different ways to use AI image recognition with Google Earth imagery. There are a lot of interesting potential applications using the satellite and aerial imagery as well as Street View imagery.
We had a look at ‘rainbow planes’ and explained how the effect is a result of a combination of the satellite’s movement as well as the plane’s movement. We noted that it was possible to use rainbow planes to estimate the altitude of the satellite and use this, combined with the imagery date and imagery supplier, to guess which satellite captured the image. This lead us to create a list of imaging satellites. We also had a look at what sun-synchronous orbits look like and then created a Google Earth Tour animating the Landsat 7 orbit.
We had a go at watching sand dunes move with the aid of historical imagery. The biggest difficulty we had was finding suitable locations, as most deserts have very little historical imagery. We were, however, able to find some examples of sand dunes moving.
We had a look at the last ten years of imagery updates for the continental US and for Europe and used this to estimate how frequent imagery updates can be expected in those regions. (Every three years for the Continental US and five to seven years for Europe.)
We had a look at a Street View tour maker created by Steven Ho. It is a clever idea that allows you to create Google Earth Tours that include Street View sequences.
Tired of waiting for Google to get to the Faroe Islands, some enterprising locals decided to capture their own Street View with the help of sheep. They have named it Sheep View.
We showed you how to process Sentinel Imagery with the help of GIMP. If you decide to try it out be sure to also read this post, which has some more details and a tool to help create the final image overlay. We also had a look at a massive landslide in Alaska with the help of Sentinel imagery.
We had a look at China’s south-north water transfer project, one of the most expensive engineering projects ever undertaken.
We discovered by accident that the backspace key allows you to go back to the previous view in Google Earth. In fact, it remembers everything you looked at for the whole session.
We found some multi-coloured patches of snow in various places that have been introduced as part of Google Earth’s new global moasaic. We believe it has to do with a bug in the way the imagery is processed for the transition between the global mosaic and the higher resolution imagery displayed when zoomed in.
We noticed some extended Street View coverage in Bangladesh and Mongolia, but at the time the Mongolian Street View was not working. That has since been rectified.
With the arrival of NASA’s Juno probe at Jupiter we discussed why a ‘Google Jupiter’ would not work the same way as Google Earth or Google Mars. Jupiter simply doesn’t have a mapable surface. Google Jupiter would be closer to a weather map than a ground map.
We created a tool that makes use of the Google Earth API to check whether placemarks have imagery after a given date. This is useful if you have a large number of placemarks and you want to check for recent imagery in their locations.
A number of readers reported that the Weather layer in Google Earth is broken. It only affects the ‘Conditions and Forecasts’ layer. It is still broken, with the exact same data showing for the places we looked at when we wrote the post.
While trying to determine how recent the imagery in Google Earth’s new global moasaic is, we created an animation of the shrinking Aral Sea.
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