Sports

Happy 4th of July!

July 4, 2012

Today in the US it is Independence Day, often referred to as simply the 4th of July. Banks are closed, BBQs are being heated up, and fireworks will fill the sky for most of us today.
Speaking of firewoks, here’s a neat post I found from Rick Klau a few years ago, when he used Google Earth to determine if he’d be able to view a local fireworks display from the comfort of his home.
He determined that fireworks typically reach a height of 300m, so he drew a polygon to that height, then used Google Earth’s terrain feature to see if the polygon was visible from his house. It was, and they enjoyed a great show that evening!

If you’re looking for more fireworks, check out the thousands of geotagged photos on Panorama tagged with the words “fireworks“. If you take any yourself, be sure to upload them on Panoramio for everyone else to enjoy.

For those of you running (or watching) the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta today, our post from last year shows you a lot of neat ways to view the course. The easiest is to simply load up this KML file

Google Earth File. You must have GE installed.

and explore it for yourself.

Whatever you do today, have a great time and please stay safe!

Exploring the Tour de France in Google Earth

June 29, 2012

The Tour de France begins tomorrow and will cover nearly 3,500 kilometers over the next three weeks. As was the case last year, Cycling the Alps has some great tools to show you all of the stages in the 2012 race.

Along with all of the great features from last year, they’ve added a few more:
• A stage dialog where you can load each single stage.
• Complete 3D tours of the prologue and all the 20 stages.
• Stage profiles.
They still have the overviews and games that were included last year, making this an excellent site for learning all about the Tour and the 20 stages it holds for the riders. Check it out for yourself at CyclingTheAlps.com.

Google Earth tours of the World Marathon Majors

May 29, 2012

Back in 2006, a handful of marathons around the world joined together to form the “World Marathon Majors“, a series of races that offer a $1 million purse. The marathons in involved are some of the biggest in the world: Boston, Berlin, London, Chicago and New York.
We’ve seen a few nice Google Earth tours of marathons, such as this one for the New York City Marathon, but Steven Ho has put together a Google Earth-powered tour of all five races.

As you watch the tour for each marathon, you’ll see the route, terrain, mile markers will pop up, and it can even flash some panoramio images along the way.
You can read more and try it for yourself over on Steven’s site, or load this KML file

to view the files directly in Google Earth.

The 2012 Giro d’Italia in Google Earth

May 2, 2012

This Saturday is the start of the 2012 Giro d’Italia bicycle race in Italy. It’ll be the 95th edition of the race and should be an exciting event.
The folks at CyclingTheAlps.com, who have created excellent tours that we’ve shown you before, have created some great resources to help to follow the race.
First, they’ve created an overview of all the new stages where you can select each stage:

Once a stage is loaded you will now get a video fly over generated using Google Earth to give you a quick look at the complete stage:

They have another page that provides an overview of the race for each stage including 3D Tours, Profiles, Street View Tours and more. Plus, they’ve created an Android App that allows you to watch fly overs of all the stages and climbs in high detail and explore the routes on a map.
Here is one more video to show what they’ve done with Google Earth. This is the final stage of the race, which is an individual time trial in Milan:

If you have any interest in the 2012 Giro d’Italia, the features provided by the team at Cycling The Alps should be of great value to you.

Explore baseball’s opening day in Google Earth

April 5, 2012

Today is the opening day of the 2012 baseball season in the US, and Google is showing off a bunch of great tools to help you enjoy it.
The best is a new video that they’ve created that shows off the various Major League Baseball stadiums in 3D inside of Google Earth:

You can also explore those stadiums using this collection from EarthSwoop,

which flies you around the stadiums via the Google Earth Plug-in.
Google also encourages you to use Google Maps for the weather, Navigation (for Android) to get the games, and StreetView to tour the outside of the stadiums. Read all about these great features over on the Google Lat Long Blog.