Google Earth Imagery – September

 

A Google Earth imagery update is underway! Thanks to sharp-eyed GEB reader ‘Falko P.’ for letting us know about it.

 

thuringia.jpg 

As is usually the case, you can use Google Maps to determine for sure whether or not a specific area is fresh. This new imagery isn’t in Google Maps yet, so you can compare Earth vs. Maps to see what’s new; the fresh imagery is already in Google Earth, but the old imagery is still in Google Maps. If you compare the two side-by-side and they’re not identical, that means that you’ve found a freshly updated area in Google Earth!

[UPDATED – 7-September, 2:50pm EST]

  • Germany: Ehningen, Flensburg, Hattingen and Thuringia — thanks ‘Armin’, ‘Falko’, ‘marek’ and ‘Michael’
  • Serbia: Lebane — thanks ‘Edi’
  • United States: Iowa (Cedar Falls, Waterloo), Minnesota (Rochester), Wisconsin (La Crosse) — thanks ‘Munden’, 2011 EAA Airventure at Oshkosh

Google Earth offline

One of the neat snippets in Google’s recent blog post about training environmental journalists was that they’re now using the Google Earth Portable Server in real-world environments, though still in a closed trial.

Google has always been very responsive when disasters strike, and the Portable Server could allow them to assist to an even larger degree. The Portable Server allows you to pre-load data from selected areas so that you’re still able to access that data even if you enter an area with no internet connection, as is common after a disaster of any kind (flood, hurricane, tornado, etc).

Google explains it in further detail on this site, but their basic information states:

With the Google Earth Enterprise Portable solution your users can select and download portions of your private globe which they can serve and access locally from their laptop. Whether fighting fires or taking off in a plane, the Google Earth Enterprise portable gives your users the Google Earth experience when they are not connected to the Internet.

The portable solution consists of:

• A simple user interface to the Google Earth Enterprise system enabling users to extract portions of a globe based on a user-defined area of interest.
•A light-weight, cross-platform server that serves the extract globe on an end users machine.

For more information about Portable Earth Enterprise, visit the Google Earth Enterprise site or watch the short video below.

Maps+Motion

Mapsplusmotion is making a digital historical atlas which shows at a glance how a city or a country has grown and changed over the centuries. The digital historical map forms the basis for educational presentations, and interactive and online applications. The applications of Mapsplusmotion are particularly suitable for educational projects in museums and historical-geographical access to heritage collections. As well as animation films and a custom-made historical layer in Google Maps, we supply interactive educational applications and printed material.