Google Earth 4.3 Offers a Number of New Features

GoogleWatch writes "Google's all excited for Earth day, and just in time there's a new version of Google Earth available. 4.3 offers up revamped navigation controls, 3-D photo-realistic buildings in major cities, and time-lapse views of sunsets and sunrises. Also new in Google Earth 4.3 is access to the street view movies found in Google Maps. Just click any of the camera icons and the familiar street view window will pop up. The sunrise and sunset movies are also quite impressive. Fly to a location you'd like to see and click the "sun" button in the toolbar. That will bring up a small timeline graphic and you can either hit play or drag the timeline slider to watch the day unfold."

Comments

Question:

[Enlarged to Show Tex]

How does it handle the sunrise/sunset shots for locations that enjoy periods of 24x7 daylight during the summer? Does it (correctly) show the sun rotating around the sky?

Re:Question:

[freeweed]

We're past the spring equinox so to test this, zoom out far enough that you can see the entire globe. Put the north pole roughly centered on your screen. Now run the 24 hour slider back and forth - you can quite clearly see daylight never leaving some areas of the far north. By June this area will be much-enlarged.

As the actual "viewing the sun from ground level" part of GE seems to correspond to the sun's terminator everywhere else I've tried it, I see no reason why the same wouldn't work from the land of the midnight sun.

It's actually kind of fun to look at the entire globe at once - it really brings home why northern latitudes get longer daylight this time of year. The terminator is clearly angled during both sunrise and sunset to demonstrate the earlier sunrises and later sunsets the further north you go. The closest I've seen until this is the usual flat projection of the Earth with a distorted day/night overlay.

Another cool thing is to use GE to show how the sun does in fact set further north than straight west (in the northern hemisphere) during summer. A surprising number of people refuse to believe that this is the case.

Speaking of Google Maps... Argentina?

[Nicopa]

This is slightly offtopic, but... I live in Argentina. This country has been excluded from Google Maps since its beginning (Google Maps'). It's the only excluded country in Google Maps, I guess.

If you search for it you will see that the map is just a white area. Not even the major cities, or the capital. We only have satellite images. Does anyone reading this know what's going on?

Re:Speaking of Google Maps... Argentina?

[rat7307]

Same for North AND South Korea, that surprised me a little bit.....

Re:New Images

[Christianfreak]

Exactly. I haven't downloaded the newest version yet but the version I have, and google maps sat view on the web has an empty field where my neighborhood is. My neighborhood has been here for almost 4 years. In a rural area that makes some sense but I'm in Dallas.

What's worse they haven't even updated the street map itself, so even though the Google van did street view recently (not all the way where I am) they couldn't be bothered to update streets that they still don't show on the map. Those have been there for more than 2 years.

photography tool

[carlcmc]

One could use this for planning of landscape photography and how and where the setting sun will be.

Re:Great but...

[pjludlow]

I agree. I was browsing some areas of places where I've lived and while there are some new higher quality images in parts of Honduras, my current residence in the US has a lower res image than it had previously (although it is newer now).

I also think there should be some sort of tag listing the date of the image (maybe there is but I can't find it) so that if I'm planning a trip I can tell that the image was from 3 years ago and that the roads could have changed since.

Evil POS!

[Raven737]

Makes you install and updater (not just as a constantly running Service but also as a DRIVER?!! WTF!)
then it also sets google as default search engine and installs google toolbar.... can this be any more EVIL?

Luckily i have a VMware 'crapware' virtual machine... this got installed on there, once done, i just copied the Google Earth folder to my real machine, GE 4.3 Beta without the *unnecessary* crap :)