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Another Sailor Documents Trips Using Google Earth

November 9, 2005

In my opinion, documenting a long distance travel log is one of the most interesting applications of Google Earth. Especially if you combine the mapping capabilities with a web site which tells the story and has photographs. Recently Geoff Shultz, who sails his boat BlueJacket in and around the Caribbean, put together an excellent Google Earth file documenting his anchorages and passages. If you click on his anchorage icons you see a short description for that anchorage, and usually links to a full report and/or photos. He announced the availability of his log in this post. Geoff also organized his anchorages nicely by country.
A couple of months ago I published a similar GE file for a sailboat trip on a catamaran called PatiCat. If you like Geoff’s effort, you’ll probably enjoy the PatiCat voyages as well. By the way, in honor of this occasion, I have updated the PatiCat KMZ to include a more complete log. [EDIT 10-Nov-2005: the author, Geoffery Shultz just sent me a message saying my similar cruising log inspired him to do his.]

Lewis and Clark Expedition in Google Earth

November 8, 2005

Maps are wonderful things, but maps combined with Google Earth are even better. One of the Google Earth team members, known as ‘ink_polaroid’ in the Google Earth Community, a few months ago posted a historical map of the Lewis and Clark Expedition . The GE file includes colorized tracks of the route taken during the expedition, and placemarks with links to a sample of diary entries from the expedition members from the Discovering Lewis and Clark website.
Make sure you open the Lewis and Clark Expedition Places folders and see some of the other features. He has a map showing the extent of the Louisiana Purchase (which is what initiated the L&C Expedition), and placemarks to other sites during the trip. You can zoom in and see the sites up close, and also turn on the “Roads” layer to make comparisons to their trip. Don’t forget to “Tilt” the view and see the mountainous terrain they travelled when they got out west.
The power of combining the 3D views of GE, the satellite and aerial photography of the terrain, the tracks and placemarks, with the links to the web make this map so much more informative than any paper map.

MapLandia – Unique International Google Maps/Earth Website

November 2, 2005

Maplandia.com was announced last week. I hesitated to write a story about it because it has limited Google Earth support. But, Maplandia does have a lot of potential. Maplandia.com addresses a concern that much of the world is not currently really mapped in the Google Maps data. Sure, there are borders and capitals and such for all countries. MapLandia provides regional and administrative district outlines for almost every country. It also has many more cities and geographic references for countries all over the world.
Maplandia.com provides…

GPS/Photo Tracks – RoboGEO v2.1 Supports Google Earth

October 31, 2005

For those of you who are GPS and digital camera buffs, you should definitely check out this program. RoboGEO v2.1 was recently released with support for Google Earth, and does an excellent job of taking a GPS track and georeferences your photos taken during the track. It’s pretty straightforward, you simply: 1) tell it where the photos are; 2) tell it where the track is (supports several formats); 3) tell it the time offset between camera and GPS; and then it georeferences the photos that match the track. You can then generate the Google Earth file and even label all of your photos and add descriptions.
For example, I took the photos from my recent Arizona backpacking trip (which I wrote about earlier) , and used RoboGEO to produce this Google Earth file (WARNING: this is a 2MByte file). You will see the track in red, green placemarks for the photos, and a bunch of entries in the placemarks pane. You can click the photo placemarks and see photos and descriptions to get a sense of our trip. In particular, on some of the scenic views I tried to duplicate the view in GE from the photo (double click on a photo placemark to see this).
RoboGEO gives you…

New Satellite Photos for Pakistan – Kathryn Cramer

October 25, 2005

Kathryn Cramer, who became well known in the Google Earth community for her efforts surrounding Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, has also been working on the Pakistan Earthquake relief efforts. Kathryn has a well-written blog where she helps by providing an international information resource. She in particular has been working with the Global Connection Project (a team of folks from Google, NASA, Carnegie-Mellon University, and some other Universities as well) to try and help get better satellite photos available to relief workers.
Kathryn has announced that an initial set of high-resolution Google Earth image overlays for the earthquake areas has been released by the Global Connection Project. She has included screen shots as well.