The Google Earth Library showcases add-on content for Google Earth. Some of the content you will find here was created by myself, and some of it created by others.
To view an item in Google Earth, simply click on the "Download With Google Earth" button, which will be at the end of each post.
The National Register of Historic Places has identified and documented approximately 80,000 districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects that are significant in American history, architecture, archeology, engineering, and culture. The Register is maintained by the US National Park Service (NPS).
The NPS has created a Google Earth version of the database, which you can find at the National Park Service Google Earth Layers web page. However, the version they created isn’t very user friendly and appears to be out dated.
I’ve used the most current source data (as of November 2009) to create a much more user friendly version of the Registry. Simply download the Network Link from the bottom of the post, zoom in close to a city, and the historic places will automatically show up as you navigate around.
The historic places are separated into Points and Areas. The Points typically represent a single location, such as a house or building. The Areas might represent large areas, such as historic districts. There are approximately 80,000 locations mapped in total.
The placemarks do have some geocoding errors, which are carried over from the source data. I have no plans to correct these. However, I think overall the geocoding appears to be very good.
This collection is not intended to be current, “official” or complete!!. You MUST go to the National Park Service website if current or official information is required.
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This collection of moon overlays was originally created before Google released their amazing version of Google Moon (View | Explore menu in Google Earth). I’ve now gone back and updated the original collection of moon overlays to remove duplicate data, remove some broken links, and supplement Google’s Moon data. Unfortunately, I can no longer get the NASA/JPL Moon WMS Server or Map-A-Planet WMS Server to work with Google Earth, so those overlays have been removed.
The following layers are included:
Simply open the KML file linked above with Google Earth. Google Earth should ask if you want to switch to Moon mode.
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Various high resolution historic aerial photograph overlays for various cities. I will continue to add additional locations as I have time.
The collection currently includes the following:
Los Angeles 1948 (Aerials from USGS)
New York City 1954 (Aerials from USGS)
Oakland, California 1948 (Aerials from USGS)
Chicago, 1938 (Aerials from Illinois Natural Resources Geospatial Clearinghouse)
Los Angeles Intl Airport, 1938, 1945, 1952, 1963, 1985 and 1992
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Credits See Above |
The European Digital Archive on Soil Maps of the World (EuDASM) is a massive repository of scanned soil and geologic maps covering large areas of Africa, Asia, Canada, Caribbean Islands, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. The maps were archived over the years by ISRIC – World Soil Information and were recently been scanned and made available online. It looks like there are 1,000’s of maps in the EuDASM digital library.
An engineer working in Kenya for Engineers Without Borders contacted me recently about converting some of the maps into overlays for Google Earth, which I was happy to do. These maps can be accessed from the link at the bottom of this post.
I’m not sure how much of a demand there is out there for Google Earth versions of these maps. It would be great if they were all converted into Google Earth overlays, but that would be a huge undertaking. In the meantime, I’d be more than happy to help out any other individuals or groups out there that could benefit from having some of these maps available in Google Earth. I don’t have the resources or time to do all of the maps in the archive, but I can certainly help out with regional efforts. If you have a specific group of maps that you’d like to see added to the Google Earth overlays, contact me.
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Credits European Digital Archive of Soil Maps (EuDASM). 2005. Maps are holdings of ISRIC. Maps are made available by the European Commission – Joint Research Centre through http://eusoils.jrc.it/esdb_archive/EuDASM/EUDASM.htm |
I recently finished updating the Google Earth Resources page. This page contains a list of Google Earth related blogs, developer/user tools, etc. that will be of use to the casual Google Earth user and the advanced KML developer. The resources have been organized into various categories, and a short description is provided for each.
I’ll continue to add to the list of resources as I find them. I’m sure I have just scratched the surface of what is out there, so i you know of any good ones that I’ve missed, let me know and I will add it to the list.
This collection contains 28 1×2 degree geologic maps covering the entire state of California.
The 1:250,000 scale maps were produced in the 1960s and 1970s by the USGS and State of California Division of Mines and Geology.
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The TerraLook Archive contains 1,000’s of satellite images from the Terra and Landsat satellites. Many of the images covering environmentally sensitive areas (South American rainforests, etc.) throughout the Earth have been converted for viewing in Google Earth by Dr. Mark Mulligan of King’s College London. The images in this collection date from 1972 to 2006.
Simply select the year you are interested in and zoom into one of the areas covered with imagery. The imagery should appear automatically.
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The collection contains over 2,200 satellite images obtained from NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites overlaid onto Google Earth. These satellite capture excellent natural color imagery in amazing detail from all over the Earth. NASA posts some of the most interesting imagery collected from these satellites several times per week at the MODIS Gallery. NASA also has a MODIS Image of the Day web page, and a RSS Feed if you want to keep up on the daily postings.
The images typically show major events occurring in the world that are visible from space. Dust storms, hurricanes, tropical storms, volcanic eruptions and wildfires are just some of the events captured by the satellites.
One of the shortcomings of the NASA gallery is it lacks a nice user-friendly index for Google Earth. So that’s what I have created for this post. Simply download the KML file from beneath the screenshot and you will get an index sorted by year of all (well…almost all) the MODIS Gallery images from 2003 through 2009. Each image is represented by a placemark and description of the image. Click on the placemark, then click on the blue hyperlink in the pop-up balloon to load the image into Google Earth. Most of the images are around 1 to 5 megabytes, so it might take them a minute or two to load. If you get a Red X, that probably means the image was too large for your computer to download.
About 10% of the images were not indexed by NASA for Google Earth for various reasons (size of image, wrong projection, etc.), which unfortunately includes all imagery near the north and south poles. Also, the quality of the image as you see it in Google Earth might vary depending on how much video memory you have available since these are large JPG files and have not been tiled into SuperOverlays.
I will try to update the index a couple times per year.
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