Google Earth puts an entire planet's worth of useful, relevant, and just plain weird content at your fingertips.
Once you've registered for a free account with the site, you can download a Google Earth network link to see all of the different types of caches near a location.
There are exceptions, such as along the coasts, where rainfall patterns are affected by the ocean, and deserts where there is low cloud cover year round.
GPS radios that automatically capture data about where exactly a photo was taken, you can use one in conjunction with Google Earth and other tools to start building an entire world full of images.
The India Literacy Project teamed up with Google Earth to take children around India on virtual field trips and learn about their world.
Thanks to the incredible leaps in technology since then, these days you can watch the feeds from a Webcam attached to the front of a cruise ship sailing somewhere in the middle of the ocean.
Going about our daily lives, we give little thought to the thousands of satellites that zoom around above our heads, carrying our communications, transmitting television signals, and sometimes even taking our pictures.
The data includes all commercial flights as well as many private ones, and it updates every minute (lagging just 5 minutes behind real time), displaying the flight path as a 3D line around the surface of the virtual globe.
Coconut octopuses are among the most intelligent invertebrates around: They use tools, carry their shelters around for when they need them, and, fittingly, adopt an underwater walking motion that's very similar to humans.
The caches, which can be well concealed, usually contain small trinkets and a log book in which you can record that you found the cache before you put it back for the next person to find.
We used the Google Earth API to scan the globe and for a given location check all the dates of available historical imagery then calculate which was the most frequent month.
They remind us all of the devastating impact of war on the people in those cities and also the remarkable way in which urban environments are reconstructed and regenerated over time.
NASA satellite imagery and astronaut photography reveal where an English alphabet can be found in the landforms of the Earth.
Find out the length of an upcoming hike, the distance between Tokyo and Timbuktu, or the size of your local park with the Measure Tool.
When you open these files, however, the content may not immediately display; in that case, look in the Temporary Places folder in the Places pane.
The openAPRS database tracks the current location of hundreds of satellites in Google Earth, grouping them into categories such as amateur radio, global positioning, weather, and even military satellites.
Google Earth, the locations posted on any Craiglist page; as a result, if you're searching for an apartment, for instance, you can instantly see if the listings are close to subways, restaurants, or whatever other amenities you might be interested in.
The UK has aerial imagery from 1945, 1960, 1990 and 2000 and more, which has only the year listed in the date.
To learn more about the gate structures, archaeologists will need to travel to the area to survey the walls and try to date the lava flows and look for any artifacts associated with them.
Once you complete a free registration process, you can even search for a particular flight number and see exactly how far away the plane is from the airport.
Google Earth mashups present a dizzying array of information in a new and imaginative graphical form.
Surely the avoidance of extensive shadows from the sun low in the sky throughout shorter days is another key reason to avoid capturing imagery in winter in higher latitudes.
Spring and deciduous trees in full leaf indicate that the vast majority of the default imagery in the UK was captured in the lighter summer months between the Spring and Autumn equinoxes.
With the help of Google Earth, researchers examining the deserts of Saudi Arabia have found around 400 unreported stone structures in the Arabian Desert, likely built by nomadic tribes thousands of years ago.
Back in the dark ages of the Internet, people were thrilled to log in to a Webcam on the other side of the world and see the trees outside someone's window, or the status of a coffee machine.
Imagery for Warsaw, which was heavily destroyed at the time, is available from both years 1935 and 1945.
If you have a question, use the official Google Earth and Maps Forums or the Google Earth Community Forums.
The highlight is the world globe from 1790 (shown), which demonstrates how dramatically the borders have shifted for many countries, especially in prewar Europe and the Middle East.
We hope that this World War II imagery will enable all of us to understand our shared history in a new way and to learn more about the impact of the war on the development of our cities.
In 1997, he began aerial surveys of lava fields in Jordan, documenting stone structures including kites, which were a type of animal trap, funeral monuments and wheels of an unknown purpose.
