Mickey Mellen

Commemorate Memorial Day with Google Earth

May 26, 2014

On this Memorial Day, we offer you a few tools to help honor those who gave it all.

As we’ve done the last few years, we encourage you to check out Sean Askay’s Map the Fallen project. Using his KML file, you can learn about many of the people that have lost their lives in recent US military duty.

Another neat item to check out today is the US Medal of Honor collection that we first showed you in 2008. It was created by user ‘Up_The_Spurs’ from the Google Earth Community. You can download the KMZ

Google Earth File. You must have GE installed.

and view the birthplaces, rank, organization, location of deed and citation for each winner.

If you know of any other great Memorial Day resources for Google Earth, please leave a comment and let us know.

About Mickey Mellen

Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.

Tips to make Google Earth appear more realistic

May 23, 2014

Over the years, the realism of Google Earth has improved quite a lot and there are things you can do to make it more realistic.

3D Imagery
The first one is pretty easy; simply by enabling the 3D buildings (powered by the auto-generated 3D imagery), you’re off to a great start. While the 3D imagery can look pretty bad from low altitudes, it looks stunning when flying over a city.

Photorealistic atmosphere
The big key to making Google Earth look awesome is to enable the photorealistic atmosphere, along with the “sun” and “water surface” features. By doing the above, you can end up with a scene similar to this:

These features can be quite resource intensive for your computer, so most people can’t leave them enabled all of the time, but they can have an amazing impact on the realism of Google Earth.

If you’d like to take it a bit further, this article on anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering will help you understand some of those features a little more as well.

About Mickey Mellen

Waffle House locations visualized on Google Earth

May 22, 2014

Here’s an interesting use of Google Earth, that could apply to virtually any business with a variety of locations. Nik Freeman wanted to find a way to display the density of Waffle House restaurant locations across the United States, so he put together a visual display of them. He had intended to simply use it as a way to play with 3D in Google Earth, but the big spike in Atlanta was interesting enough that he wanted to share the image.

Some of Nik’s notes on the “quads” that display the data:

The quads are continuous across the entire USA. There are no gaps, so every Waffle House location falls within one quad.
Quad boundaries are static. They will not have changed if I update the data.
Quads are named for the area they cover, making it easy to discuss particular locations.
At approximately 2392 square miles each, quads are a nice “bucket” size for tabulating this kind of location data meaningfully.

It’s a great way to show this kind of data. You can read more over on his “Maps by Nik blog“.

( via Huffington Post)

About Mickey Mellen

Terrestrial Biomes in Google Earth

May 21, 2014

George at MyReadingMapped is a hard-working guy. Just a few weeks ago he brought us the map of the El Nino Zone, and he’s previously created a variety of other excellent maps. Now he’s back with a map of Terrestrial Biomes around the world.

In his words:

This documentary, in the form of a Google Map, enables you to zoom in close on the various terrestrial biomes around the world. It is a companion piece to my Google Map of the Geography of the Köppen Climate Classification System, and unlike the Climate Classification map, this map is more of a photo collection of vegetation that survive in various climates. The placemarks within the boxed area have descriptions of the various categories that are then color and symbol coded to the actual locations of ice sheets and polar deserts, rainforests, tundra, taiga, temperate broadleaf forests, temperate steppes, dry stepppes, Mediterranean vegetation, tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests, arid and semiarid deserts, grass and tree savannas, subtropical dry forests, and montane forests.

Learn more on his site, or check out the full map or download the KML file to really dig in.

Great work, George!

About Mickey Mellen

Did Google Earth discover an underwater alien base?

May 20, 2014

I had been ignoring this story since it’s so crazy, but it seems to be popping up more and more so I felt it was time to address it. In short, the folks at “Before It’s News” (and others) have been showing the following screenshot from Google Earth, claiming the lines in the image are from an underwater alien base.

It’s very similar to the story that went around five years ago claiming that the lost city of Atlantis had been found, with similar tracks showing up on the ocean surface. Google wrote a detailed blog post explaining what it really was, which is the same case here:

The scientific explanation is a bit less exotic, but we think it’s still pretty interesting: these marks are what we call “ship tracks.” You see, it’s actually quite hard to measure the depth of the ocean. Sunlight, lasers, and other electromagnetic radiation can travel less than 100 feet below the surface, yet the typical depth in the ocean is more than two and a half miles. Sound waves are more effective. By measuring the time it takes for sound to travel from a ship to the sea floor and back, you can get an idea of how far away the sea floor is. Since this process — known as echosounding — only maps a strip of the sea floor under the ship, the maps it produces often show the path the ship took, hence the “ship tracks.” In this case, the soundings produced by a ship are also about 1% deeper than the data we have in surrounding areas — likely an error — making the tracks stand out more.

I encourage you to read the full entry on that old Lat Long Blog post if you want to really understand how this occurs. Stefan at Ogle Earth also wrote a detailed breakdown of Atlantis years ago which is worth re-reading as well.