Would you like to fly around the world? See things you’ve never seen? If so I’ve got the application for you. It used to be called Keyhole but Google bought them and now it’s called Google Earth. It’s a program that reads images from a database of satellite photos and creates a map of the earth. If you’ve used maps.google.com you might have seen the image quality. This goes one better and actually lets you “fly” around the globe allowing you to zoom in wherever you want.
I’ve been using the subscription version for about 6 months but now it’s free. For those who had a subscription we get Google Earth Plus which adds the ability to print in higher res and my favorite, connect to a GPS receiver. You can download all the waypoints, routes, and tracklogs from any Garmin or Magellen receiver.
I highly recommend it. If you’re like me you’ll spend hours the first few days looking at all the places you’ve lived, visited, or want to visit.
Note:(6/29 – 5:15pm) Google must have gotten a REALLY BIG response to this because as of this afternoon the download is on hold. They say it will be available again soon.
Very cool, indeed!
Comment by Donna — Thursday June 30, 2005 @ 4:39 pm
It was the link to Google from your fabu popular blog, Don. Your growing audience immediately went over and shut the sucker down. The power and the might of the Substitute Reality!
Comment by GraceD — Wednesday July 6, 2005 @ 11:13 pm
Google maps has added a hybrid view. You can overlay the maps on top of the satellite picture now. Very cool, very helpful.
Comment by Donna — Sunday July 24, 2005 @ 6:27 pm