barnabu

Google’s LatLong blog has announced a bunch of changes to the default Google Earth Sky Layers. Some of my files are closely tied to the update, so here’s a quick list of the KML addons directly affected.  Check out Gearthblog’s post for the other main additions:

Planet Locations
Firstly I’ve updated my Orrey animation. This is the file that shows a simplified, top down representation of the solar system, designed to run alongside GoogleSky’s planet location time animations in the Default Layers - look under ‘Our Solar System’.

Google have updated the Layer to run from January to April 2008, and decreased the time steps in the time line from 1 hour to 15 minutes.  I’ve tweaked my file to synchronize with this.

Constellation boundaries
As I (sort of) predicted, GSky now provides it’s own set of constellation borders by default (under Backyard Astronomy). These are displayed as coloured polygons. This obviously reduces the need for anyone to use my KML constellation add-on.  But mine do still have some use - the two sets combine pretty neatly - with Google Sky’s polygons fading out when you zoom, and my lines staying on permanently.

Real Sized Planets
Lastly, Google Earth’s Welcome Tour now includes a direct link to my Real sized planets file (thanks Google! ), the KML Gallery plus Joey Wade and Frank Taylor’s cool Millennium Falcon, Star Wars animation.

Constellations, Google Sky, KML, Orrery, Planets, Solar System

Here’s a couple more of these Google Earth, Interactive Flight Route Maps.  Australia, including 171 airports,  and 875 scheduled domestic routes.  And one for New Zealand with 36 airports and 193 flight paths.

New Zealand Flight Map (50kB)

Australia Flight Map (300kB)

These operate on exactly the same principle as the flight map for the UK and Ireland.    Simply open the file with Google Earth, and roll the mouse over an airport to see all the routes from it appear on the map.   Click on an airport icon for more details.  

All the airport destination data for this is sourced from Wikipedia,  so don’t rely on it being 100% accurate.

I made a handful of modfications to these compared with the previous visualization:

• Flight profiles differ in heights according to their length.  The longer the route the higher it is. 
• There’s extra information in the pop-up balloons: Airport names,  ICAO codes,  IATA codes, and links to the source Wikipedia articles.   
• Yellow Icons indicate airports for which Wikipedia doesn’t yet have a flight destination list.  My script fills in the missing information for these by scanning through all the outbound destinations from other airports and assuming the same airline flies back to where it came from. In some cases, e.g. circuit routes, this will throw up false information.

Australia, Flight Maps, Google Earth, KML, New Zealand

Since I put together the Google Earth animated flights from USA airports (more of those coming up soon!), I’ve been meaning to check out the same thing without the time element - a KML file where routes only display as you hover the mouse over various airports.  Essentially a Google Earth, 3D equivalent of those interactive flight maps you see on airlines’ websites. 

As a side effect it does create some navigation difficulties,  but I still think it makes a lot of sense to de-clutter the screen, without forcing the user through a series of menus or pop-ups. More importantly, the effect is actually fairly straightforward to achieve using KML’s <StyleMap> entity. (Check this out for a good description of how it works.)

So, what I’ve done is applied mouseover effects to a (near) complete route map of scheduled flights within the UK, Ireland, Channel Islands and Isle of Man.  That’s about 800 one-way routes, between 69 airports.   Download the file here:

UK and Ireland Flight Map(250kB)

• The Placemark balloons include information about airlines and destinations.
• Labels follow Wikipedia’s convention of using place names rather than real airport names.
• Routes are displayed with  exaggerated altitude.   Still need to do a bit of work to get the balance of these right:  check out some of the hair raising journeys between the Orkney Islands (NE Scotland). 

One downside of GE’s highlight mode is it doesn’t stay switched on a after a mouse click.   However, there are a few navigation tricks that allow you to keep routes displayed and move around …

• Click the middle mouse button on an airport icon, and hold it down while moving the the mouse.
• Hover the mouse pointer over an icon, then switch to keyboard control  (cursor keys,  shift + cursor keys, Page up/down, + key, - key,  etc…).
• Click on an airport icon, quickly drag it and let go. Just as you would to set the Earth rotating.

The source data for all this is scraped from the Airport pages on Wikipedia, and compiled using a lot of Perl scripting to scrape, mash and meld it into KML.  Obviously its never going to be 100% reliable, but at least it should be pretty easy to keep the file regularly updated, and expand to other parts of the world.

Flight Maps, Google Earth, Ireland, KML, UK

A couple of updates to my recent Google Earth GPS-satellite visibility animation:

Firstly, you can now change the viewing location to anywhere on Earth.  To do this, right click on the Location folder (with the blue dot) in the side panel and select Refresh.  The animation will then centre on the current view.

Secondly, the visualization displays a Screen Overlayed bar chart by hooking up to the new, and very slick  Google charts API.   The chart shows the duration, in hours, specific numbers of satellites are visible. The idea being to demonstrate how the distribution profile changes with location.

As a secondary (secondary) option you can view a 24 frame animated bar chart.  Where I cumulatively add the current hour’s stats, shown in red, to all the previous hours’ , shown in green.  A bit OTT, but interesting to see how rapidly the API dynamically generates the images on demand, and GE caches them.
Edit (2007-12-26): removed this option temporarily - see comments.

Download the file here:

GPS Animation ~200kB

There’s a useful tutorial on how to create and embed charts in KML balloons on the official Google Maps Blog.   Only difference I found in adapting it for KML Screen Overlays (or Icons, Ground Overlays and PhotoOverlays for that matter) is I needed to use &amp;  instead of & in the URLs.

Animation, Google Earth, GPS, KML, Satellites

Time for a new KML animation!

The idea of this one is to plot out simulated GPS (Global Positioning System) satellite movements onto Google Earth, and simultaneously show how many are visible from a specific location at a particular time.  

GPS receivers need to be able to see several of these to return accurate location fixes. This animation shows that with 24 satellites in orbit the average number visible at any one time is 8.

The visualization is pretty much a direct conversion of this GIF animation from Wikipedia’s GPS article - click on the image to view it in action. The only major difference is that I display the satellites at ground level rather than their real altitude - partly due to the display limitations in Google Earth, but mainly to give better geographic context.

Currently, the file shows satellites visible from the Googleplex - check out those fancy new roof tiles shown in GE’s recent hi-res update :) - but my aim, and the main reason I decided to play around with this, is to eventually make the location completely user selectable and/or a moving target.

Download the current file here:

GPS Spider Animation 180kB

A few viewing suggestions:

• Switch off any time animations already open in GE.
• Put the time control on to a slower speed setting, and set the repeat option to wrap.   Hit the play button.
• To simplify the animation, you can try turning off/on the KML features in the left side-panel, such as the orbit paths or individual satellites.
• You get some interesting effects if you slightly widen the time control in this.

To create the KML I used similar parameters to the Wikipedia GIF:

• 24 satellites, evenly spaced along six separate orbits. Each satellite completes an orbit in 12 hours.  These are depicted using Icons, with varying <heading> values to point them in the right direction. 
• Orbital Paths (shown as white lines using an image overlay) are spread around the Earth at 60 degree intervals, and inclined at 55 degrees to the equator. During the animation these rotate because they’re are fixed in orientation relative to distant stars, not the Earth.
• The green lines represent direct lines of sight.
• The counter shows the current number of satellites visible.  In KML this is simply done by flipping through a series of different screenoverlay images. One for each number.
• The animation shows one day,  which is exactly how long it takes for a satellite to return to the same geographic location.  In real life this would be a sidereal day: just under 24 hours.

Animation, Google Earth, GPS, KML, Satellites