Here’s a great way to waste three or four hours (at least!). How? Just play with the latest Google Maps tools, which allow you to embed customized maps (such as the one below, which will dynamically update as I work on my version of it) without a developer’s key, and allows really cool plugins (which they call “Maplets”). Some of these allow elevation contours, calculate and graph trip elevation gain, and do other super-cool things (yes, you can plot the weather and any other geospatial data, too…bo-o-o-ring… ;-).

The neatest one I’ve found so far lets you generate a panorama from any location — which is very helpful for identifying peaks and other high points. As in: “If I’m here, then what is that bump over there?” Question answered… Check out Hey, What’s That? Note that this is still a work in progress, only really works well in Firefox, and also the performance can be slow (I’m sure Google Maps is getting lots of extra hits these days). The only problem is that it seems to have some problem calculating elevations with the area around Montreal (bug, which I’ve reported to the author). But give it a try anywhere else!

And if you weren’t able to waste enough time just looking at our planet, Google yesterday announced an update to Google Earth, called Sky, which — not surprisingly — allows you to explore the heavens. Shows stars and planets above your current location, animate time and see them move, plus tons of detailed imagery (hello Hubble!) so you can zoom into galaxies and nebulae with more and more detail, in that typical Google way. It’s really beautiful and addictive. Of course, other programs have generated “sky charts” for years, but with the GE interface you get the instant gratification of their zoom-to-your-heart’s-content interface.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 8h03 and is filed under Spain, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.