Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


peachtree road race

Happy 4th of July!

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!

fireworks.jpg
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.

fireworks-panoramio.jpg
For those of you running (or watching) the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta today, our post from a few years ago shows you a lot of neat ways to view the course. The easiest is to simply load up this KML file and explore it for yourself.

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

Share your GPS tracks with Track Profiler

If you enjoy working with GPS tracks from various events, Trackprofiler.com might be of great value to you.  I ran the Peachtree Road Race 10K last week, and putting my track into Trackprofiler was quite helpful.

I recorded the track on my MotoACTV watch, which showed a total distance of 5.85 miles.  A 10K is 6.2, and if any 10K race would be precisely accurate I’d expect the Peachtree certainly would be due to it’s size, popularity and history.

Interestingly enough, when I imported that track into Trackprofiler, it showed the total distance as 10.1km — almost perfect!  This made me more curious about why MotoACTV was showing such an odd number, but pleased that the raw data was apparently fairly solid.

peachtree-trackprofiler

Part of the reason is likely because of the work that Trackprofiler can do to clean up your data.  Along with simply importing it properly and showing the correct distance, it offers a number of handy tools:

  • Join multiple tracks into one
  • Split and remove parts of GPS tracks
  • Edit tracks point by point
  • Create tracks from scratch and save them as GPS routes
  • Add elevation data if your GPS track is missing it
  • Add/edit waypoints to your track
  • Detect and remove GPS measurement errors
  • Detect and remove elevation errors
  • Add and geocode images taken while recording your track
  • Move entire track
  • Convert tracks from KML, OziExplorer, Garmin, and other formats.
  • Organize your collection of GPS tracks

For more, you can play with my data from the Peachtree, or simply go to Trackprofiler.com to try it for yourself.