Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


colin hazelhurst

Americons: a Google Earth tour

We have featured Colin Hazelhurst’s work a number of times before, including a recreation of the famous flight of The Spirit of St. Louis flown by Charles Lindberg, and James Cook’s circumnavigation of New Zealand.

He has recently produced a new tour he calls ‘Americons’ showing the Spirit of St. Louis visiting the Golden Gate Bridge. It is best viewed in Google Earth by downloading this KMZ file, as you can pause it at any time and have a look around at the scenery.

The Spirit of St. Louis flies under the Golden Gate Bridge
The Spirit of St. Louis flies under the Golden Gate Bridge.

He has also put a video of it on YouTube:

For more on Cook’s voyages be sure to check out Colin’s website.

The Spirit of St. Louis in Google Earth

Colin Hazlehurst has contributed some excellent tours to Google Earth over the years.  His most impressive is likely the recreation of Captain James Cook’s circumnavigation of New Zealand, but he’s also covered items such as the 1825 Greek Independence battle.

He recently came across a great model of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis airplane in the 3D Warehouse, read up more about him on Wikipedia, and then decided to recreate the famous flight in Google Earth.

spirit-of-st-louis

The result is a very impressive tour, part of which can be seen in this video:

His plan is to present the 33.5 hour journey in about 335 minutes of animation, in other words, flying the model at 600 knots instead of the 100 knots at which the Spirit of St. Louis travelled.

He’s created this KMZ file, generated using a variant of the TourMaker tool that he’s developed for this kind of Google Earth animation. It still has some way to go, but is quite impressive already.

Great work, Colin!

The best of Google Earth for June, 2013

The end of June is nearly upon us. Here are some of the highlights from the month:

We took a look at Colin Hazelhurt’s “Sailing Alone Around the World” set of tours, which he continues to create each week.

We showed you fresh imagery from the devastation following the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma.

Google pushed out some nice updates to their ocean map, as well as fresh 3D Imagery in a variety of cities around the world and quite a lot of fresh Street View imagery.

NASA’s Earth Observatory shared some amazing imagery from the Bingham Canyon Mine landslide.

We showed you some of our favorite tips for making Google Earth work better on your computer.

Google took Street View to the top of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, then they updated the base imagery to look even more amazing from space.

If you’re looking for more areas to explore, these 25,000 ancient sites should keep you busy.

What was your favorite Google Earth story in June?

“Sailing Alone Around the World” in Google Earth

Colin Hazelhurst, who has built impressive tours such as Captain James Cook’s exploration of Australia, is back with an amazing collection of tours that show the voyage of Captain Joshua Slocum in his book “Sailing Alone Around the World“.

slocum

Captain Joshua Slocum is credited with making the first single-handed voyage around the world, departing from Boston in April, 1895 and arriving in Newport in June, 1898 after a journey of some forty-six thousand miles The animations presented on Colin’s site are organized by the chapters of Slocum’s book and within that into the significant passages that made up his voyage.

In addition to the impressive collection of narrated Google Earth tours that you can find on his website, Colin is also converting all of them into YouTube videos for easy viewing.  As an example, here is Chapter III Part 3: “At Fayal in the Azores”:

For more about this great collection of tours, you can follow Colin on Google+ or visit hazelhurst.com/Slocum to see all of the tours.

Great work Colin!