Google Earth!

It won't let me download it - it says the beta is closed? ???

I heard about that. I can get the exe file to anyone who wants it this evening, just drop me an email. <br><br>EDIT: the exe file won't work. So please disregard the above.

This is basically the same as Keyhole, which I have been subscribing to and using for about a nine months. Google just let me upgrade to Google Earth Plus from Keyhole and extended my subscription for another year!<br><br>Anyway... It was really useful when I vacationed at Park City, Utah this last Feb. I was able to scope out where my room was in relation to the slopes and even where the shop was for the wife's rental skis. So I was already familiar with the town when we got there. I just wish I could switch the picture to a winter scene with snow.<br><br>For some mountains... esp. Rainier... you can tilt for a horizontal 3-d... and rotate. Very nice.

In the screenshot that's in this thread, it looks like they credit the image source for the Rainier area to EarthSat. That tells me that they're using EarthSat's "Natural Vue" dataset for the more "remote" areas. <br><br>That dataset is essentially a very nice mosaic of Landsat Satellite images from approximately 2000-2001. The spatial resolution is normally 30 meters but they've taken a 15 meter panochromatic band & fused it together to create this sharpened natural color imagery. They also have some proprietory tools which help them blend all the individual scenes together.<br><br>It's a fairly nice product with an aggressive licensing agreement (we have a copy of the imagery at my work).<br><br>For the urban areas around here, they're probably using some 1 ft color imagery that the USGS acquired back in 2002. It was actually acquired for a Homeland Security project but is basically royalty free so everyone's jumped on board and picked it up. Kind of ironic..<br><br>If you want to check it out in 2-D, the USGS has a site:<br><br> gisdata.usgs.net/website/orthoimagery/viewer.php

The site is amazing, runs better at work with a Fast connection than at home with cable. One cavaet; I had to disable both Windows and Norton's firewall to get it to run, and in just a few hours I was invaded by hundreds of items that my freebie versions of Spybot and AdAware deemed worthy of elimination. Despite having a well-known pop-up blocker active on my browser, visible pop-ups also plagued me during the time I was running Google Earth. For me anyway, flying came with a price!

If you look at my post about NASA WorldWind (Down the list on this site a month or so ago), you will see that this service is basically already available as a downloadable free software package (very large). It is also being greatly expanded by computer savy contributors to add all sorts of features. I believe that the same info for Mars is also available, using the radar and photo imaging that is extremely detailed and complete at this time and getting better. Current events, weather and ecological events or occurances, etc. (the list is too long and getting longer!) are also addable to the program.<br><br>WorldWind does a pretty good job of caching data so that when you revisit areas you don't have to wait all over again for downloads. My guess is that all the satellite info is the same. I will need to try the Google package to see if it competes well. One issue with WorldWind is that it does eat up a large amount of disk space, I don't know yet how that compares with Google.<br><br>Bottom line is that I thought the article that mentioned this service was a bit incomplete for not researching or stating that this was already available from NASA. Also, the news article also stated that once Google finishes the beta, they will charge for the service. Nice! Its free and paid for by your tax dollars already!<br><br>Alan