My Google Map Blog

Tag: Tours

‘The Eye’, a rotating island in Argentina

by Timothy Whitehead on Sep.02, 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

We recently came across this article about a floating island in Argentina that rotates. Producer and film director Sergio Neuspiller discovered it when filming in the area and has since started a Kickstarter to raise funds to investigate it further. See the Kickstarter promotion video below:

The island is visible in Google Earth imagery and has been in existence since at least 2003, the date of the oldest Google Earth image of the location. Here is an animation showing how it moves over time:

It is fairly obvious what is happening (no, it’s not an alien base as some have suggested). When you have a floating island and a water current that flows along one side of it, it will naturally rotate and become circular over time, as well as carving out a circular hole. The phenomenon is quite rare, because the conditions must be just right. Floating islands of plants are themselves quite rare, but in addition, it requires a current, though a fairly slow moving one.

[ Update: We believe wind may be the main factor in some instances rather than current. ]

There is a special type of floating island that is very common and that is ice. The phenomenon does occur with ice, as you can see in the YouTube videos below:



We tried to find other examples of rotating floating islands not made of ice and we found one on a lake in India:

Read more about it here.

We also found a reference to one in the Okavango delta. You can read the full story about it in a PDF found here. Apparently a Brian Wilson discovered a rotating floating island and identified it in aerial imagery from as far back as 1944. It could be seen to have kept rotating up until about 1974, when it attached itself to one side of the lagoon it was in and remained there until at least 1990. We had a look at the coordinates given and not far from that location did indeed find a floating island that has moved between 2006 and 2016. We cannot positively confirm that it is the same island.

But for the real treasure trove of rotating floating islands, the place to go is the Luapula River on the border of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Sadly, there isn’t a lot of historical imagery, so good animations were not possible. So, we are showing them in the form of ‘before and afters’ to demonstrate that the islands do, in fact, move.

before
after

A round one, an oval and another shape, sharing a pool.

before
after
before
after

If we are not mistaken, the dark patches are fire scars, suggesting the island can sustain fires without destroying it.

before
after

A whole bunch of floating islands!

before
after
before
after

And that’s just some of them. There are many more! Amazingly, we could just (although only just) see some of them moving using our Landsat animations KML file.

To see the above locations in Google Earth, including historical imagery tours, download this KML file.

The post ‘The Eye’, a rotating island in Argentina appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , more...

Advanced Historical Imagery Tour Maker with the Google Earth API

by Timothy Whitehead on Jun.08, 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

There are several different ways to automate animated historical imagery that we have explored in the past.

The first, and easiest, is to use a Google Earth Tour that simply changes the date by a given increment at a set frequency. So you could, for example, change the date by one month every second. In this post we presented some JavaScript to help with creating such tours. The main disadvantage of this technique is that Google Earth’s historical imagery is not regular and so you end up with periods of no imagery changes, and some skipped images. The technique does have the advantage of accurately representing the passage of time.

The second technique is to obtain the list of imagery dates using the Google Earth API and then use a tour to change the date, showing each existing image at a given frequency. This results in an animation that shows all the images in a given time range. We presented a tool for doing this in this post.

An outstanding problem that occurs with both techniques, is that Google Earth imagery is often not the best quality so you get an animation that includes some images with excessive cloud cover or updates that only cover part of the area of interest and do not look good. In addition, if you are trying to show change over time, you may not want images that are too close together in time if no significant differences can be seen between them. When we manually create animations for the blog we choose each image to include.

Some time ago we created a tool for creating Google Earth Tours that include or exclude images of your choice. We created it at the time the Google Earth API was expected to be shut down, so we chose not to share it. However, Google has so far kindly kept the Google Earth API alive, so we think people may find it useful.

It requires a browser that supports the Google Earth API, which, as far as we know is only Firefox. So, you will need to open this post in Firefox, and click ‘Activate Google Earth’ and then ‘Allow and Remember’ in the popup.

Instructions

To begin, zoom in to the location where you want to create the animation. Then click ‘Get dates’. The tool will obtain the list of dates available for that location. Note that for locations with a large number of images, this may take a bit of time.

For most animations, you will want to start the animation at a specific point in time. Go to the date you wish to start at in the Google Earth plugin, then click ‘Set first date’. This will exclude all dates before this date.

Now go through each image deciding whether to include it in your animation or not. You can either select images with the plugin or use the ‘Next’ button to cycle through images. If you definitely want an image, click ‘Include date’, if you definitely do not want an image, click ‘Exclude date’. The tool has two modes. You can choose to select specific dates to include in your animation, or select specific dates to exclude. If you are only removing a few images, then the latter mode is easier.

Once you have gone through the imagery you can see how it will look by clicking the ‘Play’ button. If you are satisfied with the results, set speed of the animation by adjusting ‘Step’ which is the time between frames, then click ‘Download Tour’. You can now open the downloaded file in Google Earth and play the tour.

(warning! clears included and excluded lists)

     loop.    Step (milliseconds):


Use ‘includes’ only
Use ‘includes’ and ‘dates available’

Included dates Dates available Excluded dates

The post Advanced Historical Imagery Tour Maker with the Google Earth API appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , , more...

Mountain Visions Google Earth tours

by Timothy Whitehead on Jan.20, 2015, 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

Prompted by our series showcasing uses of the Google Earth plugin, Gary Grimm of Mountain Visions has shared with us some Google Earth tours that they have created. You can find a complete gallery of their tours here which includes a mixture of tours to download and view in Google Earth, tours to watch using the Google Earth plugin, and tours that have been recorded and can be viewed as an online video.

Although we generally prefer to download tours and view them in Google Earth, using the plugin to display tours can have a number of advantages:

  • You can place descriptive information in the web page around it, including links to further content – although most of this can be done within the tour.

  • To some degree it protects your content from copying.

  • It is easier for the user as they do not have to download the tour and open Google Earth.

Below are some of the best tours from the Mountain Visions collection presented using the Google Earth plugin. To view them using the plugin, you will need the plugin installed and a compatible browser. It may take some time to load the tours, so be patient and wait for the ‘play’ button to appear in the bottom left hand corner of the plugin.

Tour of Potential CuMO Mine – May 2012
(or download the KMZ to view it in Google Earth.)

Prince of Wales Island Watershed Restoration Projects, 2006-2011
(or download the KMZ to view it in Google Earth.)

Tour of Mores Creek Watershed Tour, October 2013
(or download the KMZ to view it in Google Earth.)

Boise River at High Water June 3, 2011
(or download the KMZ to view it in Google Earth.)

CuMo Mine
A screenshot from the CuMo mine tour.

The post Mountain Visions Google Earth tours appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , , more...

Flying around with Blue Magpie Tea in Taiwan

by Timothy Whitehead on Sep.17, 2014, 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

Over the years we’ve seen some great files come from Steven Ho, such as his panorama from the top of Mount Everest, his tribute to Steve Jobs and his Trip View Bowl visualization. He’s back with another one, which follows the path of a blue magpie as it flies along the Xindieng River, to promote eco-friendly tea farms.

blue magpie tea in google earth

The unique part of this is the way he controls the camera during the flight. Steven says it was quite challenging to control the perspective like a movie scene. If you just keep the bird in the same position on the screen the results are inferior. So he has the camera move around the bird to get different perspectives, with the bird even going off camera for brief periods. Also, to get the bird to appear properly in Google Earth he enlarged it several hundred times, which has the added benefit of making it easier to control the perspective.

You can try it for yourself by loading this KML file, or read the full write-up on his blog.

Great work, Steven!

The post Flying around with Blue Magpie Tea in Taiwan appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , , more...

Could a conman get false information into Google Maps or Google Earth?

by Timothy Whitehead on Sep.08, 2014, 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

We recently got a query by a reader asking whether or not it is possible for a conman to put a fake address into Google Earth. The short answer is yes.

Google gets its information from a large number of sources. The Earth is a very big place, so the amount of data involved is simply staggering. Errors, of course, do exist. These come in many forms, such as an island that didn’t exist, or the time that Google lost a city in Florida. When Google once removed the name “Persian Gulf”, Iran threatened to sue because the name is a very sensitive issue in the region.

Borders are often a contentious issue. It may be simply a case of borders being in the wrong place due to errors in the data supplied to Google, or border disputes, where two countries disagree about where their shared border is. Google method for the latter is to share data based on international mapping standards data – which they illustrate by showing disputed borders in red, or showing different borders depending on which country you are using the product from. Also, when new countries are formed, it may take Google (and all other mapping companies) a little while to update their maps.

One of Google’s sources of information is the general public via three main routes: the ‘report a problem’ feature in Google maps, the more sophisticated Google Mapmaker that Google released in 2008, and Google My Business (formerly Google Places). The last one is primarily for business address listings, whereas the first two deal with more general mapping information.
The processes for changing mapping data have a number of verification systems in place. However, since it is often impossible to verify the validity of all updates. Google mapmaker works on a system of reputation whereby your edits require less verification as you gain reputation. Google My Business encourages you to verify your address or phone number. None of the systems are totally fool proof, but the same system can be used to correct inaccurate data that works its way into the system.

map of fake street
An example of information that really shouldn’t have been allowed into Google Maps.

map of conman road
This appears to be a genuine road.

So why would people want to put false information into Google Maps? Here is a story of a restaurant which closed down because, the owner claims, its listing on Google Maps showed that they were closed on what were formerly its most popular days. His lawyer thinks that a competing restaurant sabotaged the listing. Earlier this year Bryan Seely went public, saying that he used to do ‘map jacking’ for profit but decided to go public in the hopes of getting a job at Google. As a publicity stunt, he managed to intercept calls to the FBI and Secret service by placing false contact information for them on Google Maps.

It is important to keep in mind that, for example, in the vacation rentals business where scams are quite common, the information in Google Maps may be correct, but when you arrive at your destination and knock on the door, you could discover that the person you wired your down-payment to does not own the property. No one wants that kind of thing to happen.

map of imaginary road
Imaginary road really exists!

Google Maps and Google Earth mapping data should always be treated like Wikipedia: an extremely useful resource, but not guaranteed to be correct.

The post Could a conman get false information into Google Maps or Google Earth? appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , more...

The Spirit of St. Louis in Google Earth

by Mickey Mellen on Dec.16, 2013, 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

Colin Hazlehurst has contributed some excellent tours to Google Earth over the years.  His most impressive is likely the recreation of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigation of New Zealand, but he’s also covered items such as the 1825 Greek Independence battle.

He recently came across a great model of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis airplane in the 3D Warehouse, read up more about him on Wikipedia, and then decided to recreate the famous flight in Google Earth.

spirit-of-st-louis

The result is a very impressive tour, part of which can be seen in this video:

His plan is to present the 33.5 hour journey in about 335 minutes of animation, in other words, flying the model at 600 knots instead of the 100 knots at which the Spirit of St. Louis travelled.

He’s created this KMZ file, generated using a variant of the TourMaker tool that he’s developed for this kind of Google Earth animation. It still has some way to go, but is quite impressive already.

Great work, Colin!

The post The Spirit of St. Louis in Google Earth appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , , , , more...

Making high-quality movies with Google Earth

by Mickey Mellen on Jul.30, 2013, 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

We’ve mentioned Planet In Action‘s Paul van Dinther on GEB quite a few times in the past.  From his games like “Ships” and “Drive the A-Team Van” to his amazing projects like the A-tour, he always has something great in the works.

If you follow him on Google+, you may have seen his recent posts about creating super high-resolution videos using Google Earth imagery.  Here’s how he did it, in his words:

—–

Google Earth, for me by far the coolest software around because it brings the world data along with a pretty decent rendering engine. Lately I am involved in several exhibit designs where Google Earth features. Although initial plans were to use interactive Google Earth applications, I now focus on the use of Google Earth based video. There are several reasons for that.

  • Computers fail. If one computer fails once a year, then chances are that with 20 computers the risk of failure is 20 times larger.
  • Software maintenance. Think about Windows updates, Google Earth updates etc etc.
  • Software stability. Although Google Earth is pretty good for private use, it is not stable enough to be used unsupervised in a public space.
  • Broadband availability. If the internet is slow or unavailable the exhibit is dead.
  • Longlevity. Permanent public exhibits also need to run longer then the Google Earth deprecation term of two years. In other words. When Google decides to turn off the Google Earth servers, all interactive exhibits die. Not good.
  • Solid performance. Public exhibits must be robust, run reliably and must be easy to turn on and off without needing an IT guy for trouble shooting

But, there are also softer issues with interactivity. Everyone will want to travel to their house of course which is interesting only to you while the erratic motions are severely nauseating to everyone else. Exhibits typically tell a story. Camera angles, camera motion and location are carefully scripted to support the story. Allowing visitors to drive the view would be akin to letting you steer the camera during Spiderman 17 at your local cinema.

Video doesn’t have any of the above issues. However, the question is, how do you generate the perfect video from Google Earth data. The free version of Google Earth doesn’t do video recording however Google Earth Pro has a feature called Moviemaker which allows you to turn a kml tour into a video file. Although Moviemaker finally reached a quality level that it has become useful, it is still wrought with many issues. So I decided to re-invent the whole video making process.

First a warning for anyone contemplating the use of Google Earth video for uses other then private. The Google Earth license agreement does not allow you to use the video footage for uses other then private. There are also strict attribution guidelines from Google and for public use special permission must be obtained from Google. For TV and film a broadcast license needs to be applied for. You can put your video on Youtube but you may not monetize it.

Back to issues with Google Earth Pro Moviemaker. I used that software extensively over the years and during that time pointed out many issues some that have since been fixed. In fact right now Moviemaker actually looks pretty decent. But there are two major issues with it. First of all, Moviemaker has limited options in terms of video frame size and orientation. It assumes always landscape and the maximum size is 1080p.

image1

Secondly, I am on a quest to create the perfect smooth ultra high resolution (20 thousand pixels wide) Google Earth ride. Unfortunately, despite all the care taken for the kml tour, some slight hesitation artifacts can still be observed in the video footage. I suspect this is due to Moviemaker applying its own path smoothing. Besides, Google Earth Pro pricey for private users with an annual license fee of $399 USD

So, I am going to take you on a tech journey to see how perfect video can be done. Let’s first step back a bit and look at the free version of Google Earth 7. Sorry Apple users, most of the tools used only exist on windows but maybe you can find replacements for OSX. It is very easy to create a placemark with associated view and take an image snapshot at the same resolution as shown on your screen using CTRL + ALT + C.

image2

This feature copies the Google Earth image and keeps it in your windows clipboard. From here you could simply open a bitmap editor like MSPaint or the excellent Paint dot net and paste the snapshot in order to save it as a bitmap. It be a long painful process to do this for a 60 fps video as you need 60 images for every second of video. But there are macro tools that come to the rescue. A macro is a program that allows you to define actions you normally perform with keyboard and mouse in a script which is perfect for actions that are repeated over and over. I tried several tools but AutoIt script proved to be very powerful. Not only is it able to automate user actions. It turns out it is also capable to directly store the clipboard image to a file without the need to use a bitmap editor. But, now you need to start doing some programming.

image3

Not only can we store the bitmap directly to file but we can also number each image file sequentially. This will be important later on. Now we can automatically capture image frames from Google Earth and store them to a sequentially numbered image file but how do we advance our camera in Google Earth? Mickey already wrote about Tourmaker before which is a browser based tool to create mathematically perfect camera animations. It would be a small job to make it output a kml file with numbered placemarks for each frame. I could load these in Google Earth and get get the Autoit macro advance the selected placemark before each frame is captured. A bit like this:

image4

But it all seems a bit painful and it requires the sidebar to be toggled in and out of view as it takes up valuable screen space. But there is another way to control the view in Google Earth. Liquid Galaxy This feature allows me to remote control Google Earth views via the network using UDP messages. By all means check it out. You can play with Liquid galaxy if you have two computers each with Google Earth on it. But guess what! Any program can control Google Earth using a network provided it talks the right language. Liquid Galaxy uses UDP message strings  I wondered if the powerful Autoit script was able to send UDP data and…. YESSSS

image5

Don’t worry about the scary programming. It is just here as “proof” . So here we are, I am now able to animate the camera in Google Earth and produce numbered image files for each frame all automatically. However, there is a problem. Google Earth streams data in as you advance through the landscape and we have no way to see when Google Earth has completed loading all the data. In an ideal world I would love to be able to read when the loading is complete.

image6

Load progress can only be obtained in the Google Earth plugin which we can’t use for other reasons. So we are limited to simply wait for a bit before we capture each snapshot. In my Autoit script I wait 3 seconds for each frame. But because I rendered the same sequence several times this data is all in the Google Earth cache. The Google Earth cache is an invisible data storage where Google Earth keeps the last 2 gigabyte locally stored on your hard-drive. Frank Taylor uses this feature extensively on his travels when he needs Google Earth data but has no internet. So far the 2 gigabyte cache has not been an issue but if it becomes an issue there is the possibility to create a much bigger local storage using a proxy server called squid.

Since autoit script is doing so much of the heavy work I might as well push it some more. I expanded my Autoit script to automatically launch Google Earth and set it to the exact size I wanted. Since the Google Earth snapshot feature (CTRL + ALT + C) captures an image at the size it is displayed on the screen it stands to reason that the image size can be adjusted by adjusting the Google Earth Window. Now you are dependent to the size of your monitor or more correctly, the size of your desktop. On my system I run 3 1080p monitors that together form my desktop.

image7

I can re-arrange my displays in Windows. Line them up vertically or horizontally in either landscape or portrait. The Autoit script can easily adjust the Google Earth window size to exactly where you want it. While in portrait orientation take care of your neck. Mine still hurts.

image8

In the above example I moved the top of the Google Earth window to -1920 and made the window 1080 pixels wide and 5760 pixels tall. This doesn’t mean your images come out at that size because we lose the window border and menu areas. Make sure to turn off as much as you can. Here is an image frame captured in that configuration.

image9

So, now we are in control of our image frame size but all we have now is a bunch of image frames. We have yet to turn this into a video. I use Adobe CS6 creative suite which is excellent value on subscription basis but there is also a free solution. FFmpeg is a powerful free command-line video compiler that can compile your sequentially numbered images into video. There is a bit of a learning curve here as the command-line parameters depend on what video output you desire.

But once the video has been compiled you get something like thisthis or this Sadly Youtube really kills the ultra smooth effect obtained from 60 fps playback and re-compression make it much less detailed then it really is. Download a high quality video here (11MB). I thought it be fun to share some of the video journey I have been on. Maybe it will entice some of you to experiment and discover new ideas. At some stage I might release a limited version of Tourmaker and a GEMovie program that will work together with Tourmaker so that you don’t need to know any of the above stuff. You can simply focus on video making. But till then you are left to experiment and figure it out yourself based on the above. Have fun.

The post Making high-quality movies with Google Earth appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , more...

Mapping the Trayvon Martin murder case

by Mickey Mellen on Jul.18, 2013, 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

The Trayvon Martin murder case was decided a few days ago, with the jury finding George Zimmerman “not guilty” of second-degree murder or manslaughter.  However, it remains a very hot topic as people debate the decision, Zimmerman’s actions, and the way that the “stand your ground” law is handled in Florida.

To help explain the series of events that occurred on the night of February 26, 2012, the folks at MyReadingMapped have developed a very comprehensive map that shows the location of each event that night.

trayvon

The map is very detailed, including locations and times of various activities, phone call details (some with audio), video clips and more.

You can view the map on their website, in Google Maps, or directly in Google Earth with this KML file.

The post Mapping the Trayvon Martin murder case appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , , , more...

The latest updates from Meograph

by Mickey Mellen on Jul.16, 2013, 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

Our favorite “four-dimensional storytelling” site Meograph just posted a few great new updates:

  • Social photos: Import Facebook, Instagram, Flickr images (and do web image search) right within Meograph.
  • Improved design: Just got a whole lot more elegant, making stories look awesome.  Much easier on the eyes :)
  • Video preview: Check out video clips without having to leave editing
Meograph pretty design Meograph video preview Meograph social photos

Here is a Meograph that takes advantage of some of the newest features:

You can try it out for yourself at Meograph.com. Have you created any cool stories on their site? Share your links to them in the comments below.

The post The latest updates from Meograph appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , more...

Mashable’s “Google Earth Tips for Power Users”

by Mickey Mellen on Jun.24, 2013, 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

Mashable recently posted an article titled “10 Google Earth Tips for Power Users” that gained quite a bit of attention.  If you read our site very often you’re likely already familiar with the tips, but it’s a good refresher nonetheless.

1 – Travel Through Time
The historical imagery tool is indeed one of my favorite features in Google Earth.

2 – Measure Long Distances
The ruler can certainly be quite useful.  Among other things, I use when trying to find new routes to run so I can get a rough estimate of the distance before I head out.

3 – Use Layers
The many layers in Google Earth are what make it so useful, and I encourage you to dig into them if you never have before.

4 – Take or Create Guided Tours
One of the best ways to tell us a story with Google Earth is by using tours, such as this awesome one from Colin Hazelhurst.

5 – Use Flight Simulator
The built-in flight simulator is certainly great, but don’t forget to check out Xavier Tassin’s awesome GEFS application.

6 – Create and View Maps
One of the core uses of Google Earth is the ability to load and save KML files, which make it so easy to share information and locations with other people.

7 – Build in 3D
While tools like SketchUp can help you to build detailed 3D models, there are some nifty tools built in to Google Earth to help you quickly create simple structures.

8 – Explore the Sea
Added as part of Google Earth 5, the 3D Ocean is an amazing feature to explore.

9 – Explore Space
Google added the Night Sky feature to Google Earth way back in 2007, and it provides a great interface to explore the stars.  They also just added a new “starry sky” background to Google Earth as part of version 7.1, greatly adding to the realism of the product.

10 – Use Google Earth Offline
The ability to use Google Earth offline can be very handy from time to time, and this post explains how to get started with it.

All in all, it’s really a pretty solid list.  Check out their full article here, then leave a comment below and let us know what your favorite power user tip is.

The post Mashable’s “Google Earth Tips for Power Users” appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Comments Off :, , , , , , , , , , , more...

Looking for something?

Use the form below to search the site:

Still not finding what you're looking for? Drop a comment on a post or contact us so we can take care of it!

Visit our friends!

A few highly recommended friends...