PhotoOverlay tool

PhotoOverlay tool

hose of you following this blog know I traveled to New Mexico this past weekend for the X PRIZE Cup at the Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo. This was a great air and space show! I'll be bringing a full trip report (including photos) later this week, but I'm still on my way back. I flew a Cessna 182 out there, and its going to take me a little while to get back. On the way out, I flew via Houston, Tx where I stopped to visit family. While there, my sister-in-law Christine took me to the Houston Museum of Natural Science where we got to see Lucy (the 3.2 million year old remains of a very distant ancestor). See the GPS track of the flight [Google Earth File. You must have GE installed.] to New Mexico from last Wed/Thursday in Google Earth. The track was colorized by altitude and 3D datapoints courtesy of GPSVisualizer.com (see previous story on how this is done).

Here's some other news of interest:

* PhotoOverlay tool - DigitalUrban has released a tool to help you place photos with the new PhotoOverlay feature in Google Earth 4.2. I will review this later this week after I get back from the trip.
* CIA World Factbook - This nice collection of placemarks showing links to CIA World Factbook [Google Earth File. You must have GE installed.] data in Google Earth for countries around the world was updated last month to reflect the update of the database. Read more about the layer.
* Another BMNG - Barry Hunter announces he is hosting a new NASA Blue Marble Next Generation (BMNG) network link [Google Earth File. You must have GE installed.] which provides superoverlay 500 meter resolution views of the Earth (open the folder to see the choices of different versions). These specially enhanced world-wide satellite photos include different versions for each month of the year so you can get a sense of the seasonal changes viewed from space (see a time animation of this). As Barry notes in his post, this version isn't intended for every day use, but it does produce some higher-resolution versions of the BMNG which are nice to view. The new version was developed by Jonathan van Tuijl.