Sightseeing | Mapsys.info

Highlighting terrain by only showing the roads on the map

What if someone were to create a map that showed every street in the country and nothing else? Fathom Information Design did just that, and the results are amazing!

It feels kind of like the city lights of Earth that we recently wrote about, as you can clearly see cities form without any kind of borders or other overlays in there.

What’s even more remarkable about the “All Streets” map is how clearly the mountain ranges are defined. Simply by drawing in the roads, you can see them without any difficulty. A great example is the Appalachian Mountains, seen here:

You can view and/or purchase the map over on the Fathom website.

(via +Adrienne St. Aubin)

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The Atlantic’s Google Earth quiz

The Atlantic ran a fun article with a Google Earth quiz as part of it. The quiz is multiple choice, but still quite difficult. Can you identify the location of various aerial imagery from across the globe?

Take the quiz

If you enjoy this kind of puzzle, be sure to check out PlaceSpotting.com for many more quizzes like that. The entries on PlaceSpotting are more difficult because you aren’t given multiple choice options, but that makes it more rewarding when you get one right.

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The Art on Earth

We’ve seen sites in the past the collect various placemarks to view in Google Earth, giving you quick access to interesting sites around the world. Searthing.com is similar to some of those, but with a focus specifically on artist-looking imagery.

Searthing was created by Mack Lazarus and Tim Schmauch, who are behind the similar EarthArtWorld.com site. The two site both focus on artistic-looking imagery, but Searthing is designed in a blog format to show off much more of it.

With that in mind, here are some of the great places that they’ve uncovered:

Blue Phoenix (details)

Masterful Peace (details)

The images are stunning, but there’s a minor problem — most have no context to go with them. No maps, no KML, just an image. Fortunately, they’re working on adding that kind of functionality to the site, and some are already complete. Here are a few examples of items that are shown using the Google Earth Plug-in:

• New Ruins

• Sea Cliffs

• Mystic Eye

• Sand Still

Ultimately, it might be best to do a hybrid of those ideas. Show users a static image so that it loads quickly, but then offer them a view via the plug-in and/or a downloadable KML file so they can explore further.

More at Searthing.com.

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Sightseeing The busiest airports of 2011

Over the years, the folks at Google Sightseeing have continually produced excellent content. They tend to use Google Maps for their views, so we always like to see how their locations look in Google Earth as well. In the past year or so, we’ve shown you some of their items such as the set of “Wipeout” and exploring the deserts.

Their latest feature covers the Top 5 Busiest Airports of 2011. Living in Atlanta, home of the world’s busiest airport, these kinds of stories always interest me. The numbers shown below are the total number of passengers from January-May, 2011. Let’s get to the list.

5. Los Angeleas International Airport (LAX) — 24,230,832

4. O’Hare International Airport (ORD) — 25,986,415

3. London Heathrow Airport (LHR) — 26,733,585

2. Beijing Capital International Airport (PEK) — 31,080,482

1. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) — 36,548,629

Another neat image of the Atlanta Airport comes from the folks at Trendsmap. They captured all of the geo-located tweets in the Atlanta area over the course of a year, then plotted them against a dark background. The result is quite cool, as you can clearly see the various terminals of the airport, which are connected by underground tunnels. (details on Flickr)

For other interesting airports in Google Earth, check out the scariest airports in the Caribbean, or perhaps Peter Olsen’s amazing recreation of the 1977 Tenerife Airport disaster.

GoogleEarthBlog

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An explosion at French nuclear plant

There was an explosion at a French nuclear plant that took the life of one worker and injured a few others. Fortunately, no leak has been reported and things seem to be under control.

However, a quick click of the historical imagery button reveals the full plant in high resolution, dated back to 2002.

The plant first went operational in 1956, and while things may have changed slightly in the last 9 years, the aerial imagery from 2002 seems to closely resemble the shots being shown on sites like Yahoo news.

Here are a few thoughts/ideas:

1 — Google itself doesn’t blur imagery; only their providers do. With that in mind, it seems unlikely that Google would ever go back and blur historical imagery if it was provided to them in an un-blurred state at some point. Another potential complication is that the most recent imagery was provided by GeoEye, while the older (clear) imagery was provided by DigitalGlobe.

2 — Perhaps some construction at the site has been under way and things are different now than they were in 2002, or perhaps they are simply blurring the plant going forward to hide any changes that take place in the future.

3 — The imagery in Bing Maps is only slightly blurred; it’s still easy to see where the various buildings are located, though Bing doesn’t provide a precise date on their imagery.

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