Geeks loving Google Earth is all good and well, but it’s when the cool people embrace Google Earth that you know the meme has legs.

Or in this case, wheels. Longskate afficionado Pappy Boyington has a blog that documents the best longskate runs in Paris. To document the ride, he uses screen captures of a Google Earth view onto which he has overlaid a layer from a Google Maps-like French mapping service. The result is clean and clear, and provides an interesting alternative to the European road overlays already in Google Earth and the hybrid view in Google Maps (which doesn’t work in Europe).

I’ve wondered before what it would look like to replace the satellite images used in Google Earth with the maps images from Google Maps — and then turning on terrain so that the effect is that of a 3D map. For places like Sydney or San Francisco, such maps would be of far greater value than the 2D Google Maps version for pedestrians, cyclists or the wheelchair-bound. Not to mention longskaters.

Turning such views into something that is dynamically generated looks like an insurmountable challenge for hackers, though. It might have to be something best left for Google.

[Update 13:19 UTC: It would now seem that NASA has “resolved” the issue. But I’ve got proof:-)]

Open up NASA’s page tracking the Shuttle and the one tracking the International Space Station side by side. Notice something? They’re supposed to be docked as I blog this but NASA has the Shuttle ahead of ISS by a whole 5 minutes. Look:

ISS: 12:12 UTC:

Shuttle: 12:12 UTC:

ISS: 12:17 UTC:

The trajectory seems to be the same, it’s just that the Shuttle is leading ISS at a much lower altitude. It’s not an update timing issue, as a whole five 1-minute-interval updates span the difference. So where might they be? At the first location? The second? Are they filming the ISS footage in a studio in LA somewhere?

This explains why the KML dynamic link I uploaded earlier doesn’t have the two placemarks hugging. These are the pages Tom Mangan‘s script scrapes to provide “live” coordinates.

I’m sort of crestfallen. If you can’t trust NASA anymore, who can you trust? What’s the point of offering us civilians data to within a minute of precision if it is provably off by a minimum of 5 minutes?

In the last post, I linked to a Windows application that generates KML for orbits of satellites. Somehow, this wasn’t satisfactory — it’s a Windows application, so this means it won’t be of use to me when I eventually get to run Google Earth on my Mac.

I came up with another solution, and it involves sitting on the shoulders of Tom Mangan, who created this excellent Google Maps mashup with the positions of both the Space Shuttle and ISS. He wrote some code that periodically scrapes NASA websites for the live coordinates. He was kind enough to lend it to me.

I used PHP to parse the results of Tom’s servlet and wrap it inside valid KML, on the fly. I tweaked the KML so that a line extrudes from the surface of the Earth to the spaceship itself. This gives a good sense of how far up the spaceship is, especially if you’re looking at it from afar. The positions are automatically updated once a minute.

Here is the network link as a KMZ file, ready to launch with Google Earth.

Unfortunately, I did not figure out a way to get Google Earth to fly along with the spaceships, so you’ll have to do some manual maneuvering. Also, if you ask Google to swoosh in on a placemarker suspended 300km above Earth, it instead zooms in on the spot directly beneath it. I suspect this is a bug, as that is the effect I would expect if the placemarker were located on the surface of the Earth, rather than above it.

Then again, I might be wrong, as I am checking this via VirtualPC on my Mac, where the refresh rate of the image is about half a hertz. (Then again, it’s not like I’m trying to play Halo2).

Earthhopper has posted a shot to Flickr of a simulated view from the Space Shuttle, and this Google Maps mashup displays the Shuttle’s position live, as well as its coordinates.

But I haven’t yet found a dynamic network link for Google Earth that updates with latitude, longitude and height, so that we can see exactly what the astronauts see, live. (If I had more time right now I’d whip one up, but work beckons.)

[Update: 18:51 UTC: Earthhopper provides the answer in this followup post. There is a Windows application that fetches the data and produces KML on demand.]

David Burden at Converjed has built a dynamic network link that geolocates current stories of my favorite news source, the BBC World News, onto Google Earth (using an RSS feed and the BBC’s Backstage API).

He adds, “I can really see Google Earth becoming a world browser.” Agreed. And if we could get the BBC to add precise geolocation metadata to the headers of its stories, we would be well on our way to having Google Earth fly us to whatever we happen to be reading about.

(Via Google Earth Community.)

I’m a bit late on the uptake here, but I love how this overlay helps enhance Google Earth’s sense of immersion, and it deserves a permanent place on everyone’s Earth. (Well, okay, it’s on my Earth):

Berkeley University’s database of QuicktimeVR 360-degree panoramas from around the globe is now accessible via a downloadable KML file for Google Earth, courtesy of a very enterprising Thomas Rauscher.

Google Earth does a whole lot, but it can’t go the last mile and let us walk around at street level (let’s be reasonable). Quicktime VR, however, does give us that sensation. These two technologies are wonderfully complementary, and make for a killer demo to wow first-time Google Earthlings.

At the moment, the file is static, which means that it won’t automatically list new additions. Perhaps Berkeley can be persuaded to turn this into an officially supported and hosted network link?

(Via @Dawn of the 21st century)

Google Earth lets you add image overlays. This has already been used to great effect to dynamically track weather and traffic. But you can also use this feature to add geographic detail to more static features — for example, by adding a topographic relief map of Mount Rainier and then turning on the terrain function, which lets these maps stand out in a whole new way.

Topozone is one place where you can download USGS maps. They have a free demo that lets you try out some downloads (including this Mount Rainier map), but you’ll need to get a subscription before you can download detailed maps of the regions you want.

A whole further dimension is revealed if you use historical topographic maps as overlays. These are available free on Maptech’s Historical Maps site, which contains high-resolution downloadable USGS topographic maps from around 100 years ago for most of the Eastern Seaboard. In this context, the transparency slider acts as a great timeline for seeing how towns have developed over the past century.