Flying Around the Earth
So a week or so ago I downloaded the free version of Google Earth. Wow! Cool! Amazing! Lots of other superlatives!!! If you haven’t yet tried it, do so! This is one of those things that makes the Internet such a great part of modern life, that you can get something like this for free.
I’ve been having fun adding placemarks at all the places I’ve lived in my life, or spent a lot of time at. As luck would have it, a lot of these have been in the high-resolution areas of Google Earth – areas where you can zoom in all the way to seeing individual houses, with cars in the driveway. It’s been particularly fun looking at places where I grew up as a child, which I haven’t been back to in years (if at all), and seeing what’s still the same and what’s changed….like the roads I walked to get to my elementary school, and how the school and school yard have changed, and the housing development where there used to be just woods (which my siblings and I weren’t allowed to go into, because train tracks (still there) ran through it, and my Mom was worried about hobos), and the park down the street, where they had built a snow sledding hill (also still there, but the rest of the park has huge changes). Even the non-high-resolution areas are fun to visit.
One of the other cool things you can do is “fly” – using your mouse, you can “grab” onto the ground, “pull” and “let go”, and the terrain underneath will start moving in whatever direction you pulled, giving you the illusion that you’re flying over the Earth. It will keep going until you grab onto the ground (or perform some other function), so you can actually circumnavigate the Earth this way. It works at any altitude (zoom), and how fast you go depends on how much of a push you gave at the start. It can be really neat, and somewhat mesmerizing, to just fly, and watch the ground change, especially if you do something like fly north from South Africa, over the savannahs and jungles, then the Sahara, then the Mediterrannean Sea, Europe, the North Pole, Russia....
I’ve been having fun adding placemarks at all the places I’ve lived in my life, or spent a lot of time at. As luck would have it, a lot of these have been in the high-resolution areas of Google Earth – areas where you can zoom in all the way to seeing individual houses, with cars in the driveway. It’s been particularly fun looking at places where I grew up as a child, which I haven’t been back to in years (if at all), and seeing what’s still the same and what’s changed….like the roads I walked to get to my elementary school, and how the school and school yard have changed, and the housing development where there used to be just woods (which my siblings and I weren’t allowed to go into, because train tracks (still there) ran through it, and my Mom was worried about hobos), and the park down the street, where they had built a snow sledding hill (also still there, but the rest of the park has huge changes). Even the non-high-resolution areas are fun to visit.
One of the other cool things you can do is “fly” – using your mouse, you can “grab” onto the ground, “pull” and “let go”, and the terrain underneath will start moving in whatever direction you pulled, giving you the illusion that you’re flying over the Earth. It will keep going until you grab onto the ground (or perform some other function), so you can actually circumnavigate the Earth this way. It works at any altitude (zoom), and how fast you go depends on how much of a push you gave at the start. It can be really neat, and somewhat mesmerizing, to just fly, and watch the ground change, especially if you do something like fly north from South Africa, over the savannahs and jungles, then the Sahara, then the Mediterrannean Sea, Europe, the North Pole, Russia....
posted by Zookeeper | 11:30 AM
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