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July 22, 2009
Best Google Earth Tour To Date: Apollo 11
The Google Earth Tour created for the launch of Moon in Google Earth on Monday is the best Tour created since Google Earth 5 launched in February (IMHO). The tour (created by Sean Askay) describes the landing, moon walks, and the return to space of Apollo 11 with not only excellent visual aids, but also great narrations by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and Andrew Chaiken (noted author of Apollo 11 books). The tour uses animated 3D models of the lunar lander, command module, astronauts, and the flag; YouTube videos, picture overlays to illustrate various points, audio narration and sound effects, and much more. This truly demonstrates the versatility of Google Earth's tour capabilities (which I hope inspires other developers to create powerful visualizations using the Google Earth platform). Not only that, but Google has now shown that you can embed the tour in a Google Earth plugin and even embed that in a blog post. So, you can now watch the Apollo 11 tour right here 
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Great work by Googler Sean Askay - who also created the amazing Map of the Fallen KML content released on Memorial Day.
Another note: The first Moon Tour embedded on a web page I believe was this one by Keir Clarke posted at GoogleMapsMania on Monday.
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Posted by FrankTaylor at July 22, 2009 1:53 PM
Comments
Posted by: Tom at August 3, 2009 12:39 PM
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I greatly enjoyed all of the Apollo material. I am very chagrined to find no lunar lander at the landing site. They did leave the bottom of it behind. What's up?