in: Swampfox; Swampfox > 2008-04-11;
| # Posted 2008-04-11 20:15:02 | |
| jjcote: | Back in the old days, some people would track down the USGS map for a new orienteering area, which involved some nontrivial work. Pretty cool how easy it is these days to get a general sense of what an area is going to look like by using the internet. Down to the individual boulder level! |
| # Posted 2008-04-11 21:48:11 | |
| Swampfox: | It's such a nice boulder, and so isolated, that I am tempted to see if I can't get it insured.
It would actually be fairly fascinating to do a sample of orienteers and see how often--if ever--various segments of the group look at USGSs and/or Google maps. The higher resolution stuff (like the boulder image) at Google maps is so cool, and hopefully one day the coverage over the country will be complete! |
| # Posted 2008-04-12 02:57:55 | |
| cedarcreek: | I started playing with a new service a few weeks ago:
http://maps.live.com/ It has a "Bird's Eye" View that is a low-oblique (?) image taken from the four main directions. The Guitar at East Fork (The area of the start last weekend and the 2006 relay start-finish-exchange area.) The Lone Star Pavilion at Burnet Woods (Cincinnati) (There was a sprint in Burnet Woods at last year's pig.) Unfortunately, it doesn't have Bird's Eye views for Happy Jack. I already checked. It does have Austin, but not enough zoom. Why is it that Texas themes always perfuse your log? |
| # Posted 2008-04-12 06:57:07 | |
| Swampfox: | Well, the way I heard it going to church when I was a kid was that god created hell for sinners, and heaven for the faithful who showed up in church every Sunday. But he needed a place for Texans too, and that's why he made Texas. So, you see, Texas is a very special kind of place.
And if there had been even a few more Texans back in the 1860s, the war might well have turned out a bit differently. You know what they used to call two Texans versus a Yankee brigade? An even match. |
| # Posted 2008-04-14 06:34:30 | |
| feet: | Those bird's eye views are awesome. I just checked whether a tree (which doesn't show up on Google Maps) is broad- or needle-leaved for control descriptions for next week's relay champs. (Fortunately I had it right...) |
| # Posted 2008-04-14 22:14:26 | |
| Swampfox: | I first noticed some time last year that we had some of the higher resolution imagery locally--it's almost incredibly good, and especially considering it's free, right there online.
Up in the open areas where I'll be mapping this year, I can see virtually every non-contour detail I might want on the map--and that includes many details that aren't on the basemap. (That's not a quibble with the base map; it is high quality stuff.) |
| # Posted 2008-04-15 12:04:34 | |
| ebone: | I like the bird's eye views for peeking at features that--in vertical aerial photos--hide under tree canopies, especially evergreen ones, which we have in abundance in Seattle-area parks. |
| # Posted 2008-04-15 20:43:57 | |
| Swampfox: | I'd be interested in comparing this imagery with some of the photos of the area. But all our photos are safeguarded in a secret location in Norway, where they are guarded by mapping trolls.
I think Ivar might look here every so often, so, if he's reading this, maybe he can offer some comments about the detail quality in some of this higher resolution Google stuff versus our photos. I would guess that the photos--even though ours were a little too small scaled to be optimum (1:24,000 versus maybe an optimum of something around 1:16,000 to 1:18,000 for this hillier terrain; total guess)--are still much sharper. But they're not online and you can't zoom in and out of them with your browser! ; ) |
| # Posted 2008-04-16 02:43:37 | |
| bubo: | I made a few map corrections from aerial photos at Eniro.se (a Swedish map provider similar to Google) for a club event last year. The photos were more up-to-date than the map so I could add a few new felled areas with very accurate boundaries without going out in the forest - very handy in the last minute. |
| # Posted 2008-04-16 02:50:00 | |
| bubo: | BTW, have you tried Spike´s street-O in Google Maps?
Using Google´s street-view function you can actually 'run' on the streets and read the map between controls - an interesting feature to say the least - almost like Catching Features. |
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