Google Earth Zone

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A total lunar eclipse occurs tonight (Wednesday, February 20, 2008) for skywatchers in the United States. The total eclipse of the moon will also be visible tonight in most of South America and North America. You can find out when and where with Google Earth Sky .

Here in London, as well as all of Western Europe, Africa, and Western Asia, you can see the lunar eclipse Thursday February 21, 2008.

Hundreds of millions of skywatchers are expected to turn out worldwide. During a total lunar eclipse, the moon can appear blood red, an earthy brown or the color of a blood orange.

The (unofficial) Google Earth Blog discovered a free Google Earth Sky downloadable KML file that shows the exact time and place the lunar eclipse will begin in your hometown.

Naturally Google Earth must be installed on your PC. The only drawback: Google Earth will guess your location on the Earth by your IP address. As search marketers and local search experts know, it’s far from GPS-accurate.

For lucky Google Earthlings: you’ll see an animated lunar eclipse. When the virtual moon is in total eclipse on Google Earth Sky, onscreen you’ll see when you can view the real moon eclipse outside.

NASA lunar eclipse Web page, here.

Remember, it’s not a solar eclipse. You can look straight at a moon eclipse.

The last total lunar eclipse was on August 28, 2007 when the Sun, Earth and Moon were in total alignment. The lunar eclipse still held magic before the birth of Google Earth. In 2001, BBC News reported 1,500 white witches would gather in the UK, Sweden, Iceland, France, Canada and Australia during the eclipse to ward off doom.

Kevin Carlyon, high priest of the British White Witches and the Covenant of Earth Magic, said, “In old days the peasant people used to think that it brought gloom and doom.” And now? Not so much.

Still, there’s no word whether witches will cast their spells on Google Earth tonight.

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One of my hobbies is 3D modeling with computers. A couple years ago, when Google acquired Keyhole and the Google Earth and Sketchup software, I chose to build the Salt Lake Temple in 3D for it, as a tribute to my love of temples and so all the world can see this unique temple’s architecture and majesty in Google Earth.

It took me a few days, and many hours of Photoshoping photographs of the Salt Lake Temple to get the textures just right and the structure built to scale. But I think it was a worthwhile experience and will give many people the opportunity to “virtually” visit the Salt Lake Temple on Temple Square.

When I was done I submitted my model to Google’s 3D Warehouse so that anyone in the world could download and see the temple in Google Earth. Just recently I noticed that my model has been given Google’s distinction of being one of the “Best in 3D Warehouse” and will show up in that layer of Google Earth if you have it.

You can view the model, download it into Google Earth, see rankings/reviews, descriptions, location, and other details at this link.

I guess you could say that I am continuing the tradition of my predecessors in a small way, since one of my ancestors was William Warner Player, the chief stone mason on the original Nauvoo Temple. I have built other temples in 3D also, which I will share on another day.

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On Google’s popular Google Earth application, the name ‘Arabian Gulf’ has shown up to represent the Persian Gulf. In this map the upper part of Persian Gulf waters is named Persian Gulf and the waters close to Persian Gulf neighboring states are given the name ‘Arabian Gulf.’

Historically, the usage of this term for the Persian Gulf has been led by Arab figures to rally the Arab masses against the non-Arab peoples in the Middle East. Last week, the National Iranian American Council’s (NIAC) Board sent a letter to Google’s CEO, Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, pointing out the political nature of including this alternative term for the Persian Gulf on their applications.

The Persian Gulf has always been named the Persian Gulf historically dating back to European and Arabic maps from ancient geographers. Only the name Persian Gulf is accepted by the United Nations and other organizations.

In 2004, there was another dispute with National Geographic having the term ‘Arabian Gulf’ in their atlas. This was corrected after lobbying from NIAC and other organizations.

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An investigation is underway after it was discovered that town planners and architects in the Midlands are playing a massive game of Scrabble by constructing letter-shaped buildings to spell out words that can then be identified on Google Earth.

Two years ago, new office and shopping complex in Dudley was praised for its creative use of new materials on a challenging elongated site, where it ‘defined a new relationship between the built environment and external spaces.’ But what nobody realized was that when viewed on Google Earth, the architect had actually spelt out ‘HADDOCK’. The challenge was then on for a rival architect who had been commissioned to build a site directly to the south of this one, incorporating the second ‘D’ from the middle of the word. His team-mates in the local planning department soon gave permission for a new residential development, without revealing that they had successfully spelt out ‘DHAL’ with massive fifty metre letters that had become the homes for hundreds of people.

On being challenged that ‘you can’t have curry dishes as they are not proper English words’, the office responsible explained that ‘Dhal’ was in fact in the Oxford English Dictionary, and was ‘a type of tropical woody herb much cultivated in the tropics’. The large ‘L’-shaped building at the southernmost point of the development necessitated the demolition of a rural school, thereby earning them a triple word score.

It has emerged that after a succesful challenge last year, that ‘you couldn’t have ‘THERMOS’ because it was actually a proper noun’, a new hospital and old people’s care home were demolished as the architects and planners were forced to take their go again.

The officers in Dudley’s Town Planning department who based their decisions on this game of Google Earth Scrabble have now been sacked from their department, but not before they had given the green light to a new City Academy, which joined up to the last letter of HADDOCK and used up their last letters, U, F and C.

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Yesterday I tweaked my phone to write GPS data into the EXIF tags.

Today I drove from my apartment to my mother’s home, to the library, and then back home.

I took and uploaded a picture at every red traffic light on the route. I collected the pictures into the photo set Over the River, Through the Woods. I turned that photo set into a Google Earth KML file with with Adam Franco’s Flickr Photo Set to KML converter.

You see a view of that file in this image, tweaked (in emacs) for color and altitude.

You can download the KML file here.

Compare and contrast this image with Route Map on Flickr.

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It may be hard to imagine that people working at the BBC ever get downtime on the job, but during a quiet night shift, one employee decided to tinker around with Google Maps. The result? A mashup that shows the locations of BBC bureaus and reporters around the world. If you click on one of the map icons, you can read stories that are generated from that location. You can also find out which specific reporters are covering stories from a particular place and read their work. Being both a maps enthusiast (obviously!) and a bit of a news junkie, using this mashup is a mix of business and pleasure. You can read more about it, or head straight to the map to follow the world’s news.

via:google latlong

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Since my favorite team, the 49ers, didn’t make it to the Super Bowl this year, I’ll be rooting for the Patriots this Sunday. But no matter who wins, half the fun of watching the big game is the atmosphere. UrbanTailgate.com has put together a Super Bowl My Map with all the best places to watch the game in New York City. They list over 80 bars holding tailgate parties and point out who’s offering Super Bowl specials. So if you’re in New York, check it out and find the perfect place to cheer on the home team… or the Patriots!

via:google latlong

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Users of U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) earthquake information now have an additional way to access that information. By viewing worldwide historic earthquake data with Google EarthTM mapping technology, users can quickly and easily visualize scientific information in a geographic context.

Although the huge databases of earthquake occurrences have been available publicly for a long time, the interactive graphic display of Google EarthTM makes it easy to understand the context and significance of each quake. Pop-up windows in the application give the user more information about the earthquake’s magnitude, date, location and depth.

USGS and GoogleTM signed an agreement to publish historic earthquake data from the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) catalog as a “built-in” layer, accessible directly from the Google EarthTM viewer. Now, it is simply a matter of toggling a check box to turn on the earthquake layer, similar to roads and other geographic features. The new layer includes historic earthquakes since 1900, and USGS real-time earthquakes are now accessible as a hyperlink from within Google EarthTM. If the layer is checked, users will see a sprinkling of dots across the globe, each marking an earthquake epicenter.

Prior to this new release, earthquake data for Google EarthTM was accessible from the USGS earthquake web site (http://earthquake.usgs.gov), but users had to purposefully seek out the data feeds or stumble on them while browsing the USGS web site. The ease of finding USGS earthquake data directly within the Google EarthTM viewer makes complex scientific data much more accessible and understandable to more people worldwide.

To display the earthquake locations in the Google EarthTM viewer, go to the layers menu, and look in the folder “Places of Interest.” Open the “Geographic Features” folder, and click on “Earthquakes.”

In late 2004, USGS began offering a real-time earthquake layer for Keyhole Viewer (now Google EarthTM), one of the first applications for visualizing real-time data in a virtual globe environment. Development continued, and UCLA professor Peter Bird’s plate boundaries were added to give the earthquakes context in a global setting. Later, USGS began offering a complementary layer of historic earthquakes, giving a continuous earthquake catalog from 1970 to the present, viewable in an interactive environment.

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192.com just added a Super Mega Zoom on London (and only on London!) which is much more detailed what Google Earth is offering right now but see for yourself, it’s kind of creepy.

The view 192.com is offering on the London’s Eye:
[Read the rest of this entry…]

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Our previous posts on basic and advanced KML Region concepts gave you some background on how this functionality can be used allow you to stream your data in pieces instead of as a whole making it possible to deliver large datasets to the Google Earth viewer. In this post you will discover how to use Arc2Earth with your existing ArcGIS data to create these powerful features.

Arc2Earth can be used to create Google Earth Regions through the Regions tab with the Publisher version of Arc2Earth. The General Options button displays the Region Options dialog which can be used to set the fade effects and level of detail (LOD) for the region. You must also select a region level which is basically a course grain level similar to the levels of map tiles used in Google Maps or MS Virtual Earth. Each level represents an approximate map scale. The Visualize button displays a map window with the grid showing the regions for your export along with your layer data.

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