Sightseeing

Geocaching Google Earth

August 15, 2005

Even if you have never heard of Geocaching, you’ll find the following network link an interesting way to explore the Earth. What is Geocaching? It’s a recreational byproduct of the GPS and the Internet. From the Geocaching FAQ:

The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.

Arizona Hiking Trip

August 10, 2005

One of my first serious uses of GE was to examine data from a recent backpacking trip. The backpacking trip was up Mount Wrightson, Arizona and I took my GPS along for the hike. I saved the track and waypoints from the GPS and imported them into GE. Then I superimposed a USGS topgraphical map of the area for further reference. I also added some photos taken during the trip (which I georeferenced using the GPS track and time stamps from the camera).

The result is a GE KMZ file which you can view which really illustrates the backpacking trip. Especially if you use the tilt function (I recommend using your middle mouse button if you have one) to see the rugged terrain of this 4000 foot ascent. You also get an idea just how fabulous the view is from this peak.
By the way, if you turn on “Borders” in GE you can see that the border of Arizona and Mexico is easily viewed from the peak.

Sightseeing in Google Earth

August 2, 2005

All of us go and explore the Earth after installing Google Earth (GE). But, some of the most interesting things are hard to find. Thankfully, thousands of other people want to share their finds with you. The hard part is finding the best.
The first place to look is at the Google Earth Community (it’s at the Keyhole site, since Keyhole was the original version of the product before Google bought Keyhole). You can find all kinds of interesting places by reading these forums. But, the format is kind of hard to use to delve through all the information and find the real gems.
Another good site is www.gearthhacks.com. At the time of this writing they have over 2000 entries and a nice “photo” gallery approach to showing interesting Google Earth places. I will be including these and other locations in my reference section soon.