Google Earth

Go to google and search for google earth.
download the free version..

It's fantatstic,

You start off with a view of the globe and you can zoom into street level of all the major cities on earth,

Auckland looks amazing.

Darn. It can't run on Mac yet. :notfair:

But I have a chance to use the new emoticon! :icon_mrgreen:

Yessss! :041: Finally managed to get it working, as it didn't want to open for me initially. Needed to change a setting. I'd seen it mentioned elsewhere some time ago but didn't think our PC was equipped to download it successfully but today I thought I'd have a go anyway. Very good, but close-ups only work for certain areas and we're not one of them :022: . Great way to pass the time, if you like that sort of thing.

Shame Hamilton isn't covered for close-ups or I'd have Taffy under surveillance 24 hours a day :043: .

Hamilton isn't covered but Pukekohe is..

strange but true...

I've put a satellite jammer in place to prevent spys looking in on me (No names mentioned, eh Bear?)

Has anyone any idea how they work this? Just how old are the shots of various places? Why I ask is that I zoomed in to where our (newly-ish built and already up for sale) house is in Spain and there were no tarmaced roads or garden walls showing. They were put in during autumn of last year so the shots must have been taken prior to that. Wondered whether what we're looking down on is actually quite out of date across the board or whether it varies from place to place. Had a lovely trip down memory lane when we 'wandered' around Kuwait City reminiscing about our time there. Very clear.

My son said a kid in his school was looking at the twin towers yesterday!!!!!!!

I can't access it to see if its true or not, so don't slate me if he's having a bad dream or something.

I thought it was actual time but as you say praps not.

I just went onto Google Earth to check and what I see is Ground Zero where it looks like all the wreckage has been cleared away. There are markers where the two aircraft came in. I can see construction vehicles and what could be temporary buildings or Portacabins which are 'graphically enhanced' rather than the actual buildings. There is writing saying WTC 9-23-01 (which is American for 23-9-01) but there's no way they would have cleared all that rubble in just 12 days.

There's another program (apparently more robust, but less marketing than Google) by NASA. GoogleEarth uses the same thing, but is the older version

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/index.html

It's also free.

I downloaded this, but looks like you need a pilot's licence to operate it. Very complicated picking your way through the instructions. I can zoom in but everything is blurred. I can't get it to focus. Certainly not as easy as Google Earth to operate unless I'm missing something. I'll have to spend more time browsing through the instructions. There must be a way.