Tag: wired
Airport runways are beautiful in Google Earth
by Mickey Mellen on May.27, 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
A while back we looked at some of the scariest airports in the Caribbean, but Lauren O’Neil has taken it further by finding some of the best-looking airports in the world in Google Earth.
You can find all of Lauren’s work at holding-pattern.tumblr.com. While her images are quite stunning, the logic behind airport runways can be even better.
Joseph Flaherty at Wired recent wrote a great article that explores the details of how runways are structured in terms of colors, symbols and fonts. A great example is in his “runway math” section:
Airport runways aren’t numbered based on priority, but compass bearings. A runway that is 194° away from magnetic north would be simplified to 190° to prevent rounding errors, and the last digit is dropped, leaving it at 19. Fun fact: Most runways are able to be used in both directions, and when approached from the opposite side the runway’s number is achieved by subtracting 18 or 180°.
I encourage you to read his entire article to learn more, then check out Lauren’s blog to see many other examples around the world.
The post Airport runways are beautiful in Google Earth appeared first on Google Earth Blog.
MapBox announces near real-time imagery coming soon
by Mickey Mellen on Jul.15, 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
MapBox, who we mentioned briefly from the Where Conference last year, has just made a very impressive announcement — soon, you’ll be able to grab imagery as fresh as six hours old from many places around the world. With standard imagery taking weeks or months to appear in Google Earth, this would be quite a drastic change.
According to Wired, their initial goal will be on “getting images of news-worthy events ASAP. Images of things like landslides, floods, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, train crashes, oil spills and other disasters, war zones, massive protests or other gatherings, ice-shelf break-ups, etc.”
Unfortunately, MapBox doesn’t allow you to export their data as KML into Google Earth. Perhaps with this new imagery system there will be new ways to download and use it, but time will tell. The MapBox interface is quite nice, but integration with other products such as Google Earth would make it far better.
They plan to launch this new system (“MapBox Satellite Live”) later this summer, so we’ll keep you posted. You can read more about it from this post on their blog.
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