Earth From Above / Pale Blue Dot

March 17, 2012 1:55 AM

Earth in perspective:

• Stratocam takes the most beautiful landscape satellite photographs from Google Maps, as voted on by visitors, and switches them every few seconds, with a fullscreen mode.
• ChronoZoom is an interactive, zoomable HTML5 timeline of the entire history of the universe, from the Big Bang to Homo Sapiens, with embedded video and lectures.

posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul (10 comments total)

Stratocam is pretty neat. I ignored the vote up, vote down aspect and just let it play. At times beautiful, at times disturbing (we have REALLY fucked up this earth in many places!).
posted by HuronBob at 2:45 AM on March 17, 2012

That's just showing off- two great posts in one!
posted by Gratishades at 3:52 AM on March 17, 2012

Chronozoom looks incredibly useful as I prepare for to teach introductory Physical Anthropology. One of the most challenging things for students was getting them to understand just how little time humans (and our ancestors, and mammals, and multicellular organisms) have been on earth - and what an outsized effect we've had on the planet since our emergence.
posted by ChuraChura at 4:22 AM on March 17, 2012

It would be nice if you could link to specific scenes. In the shot that came up it would instantly flip from one view to another - really odd. I finally figured out that if you zoom out you can get the other view, at a slightly different angle. It was this view here (zoom in and out), but I had to go find it myself.
posted by delmoi at 4:38 AM on March 17, 2012

Yeah, some of these aren't even labeled. this was just labeled 'united states' If you zoom out, you can tell it's hawaii, but still.
posted by delmoi at 4:49 AM on March 17, 2012

The stratocam photos are cool, though I found myself wanting to know what was going on a few times. (Was the lake in Baghdad red because of industrial pollution? Slaughterhouses? Natural algae bloom?)
posted by Forktine at 5:48 AM on March 17, 2012

Stratocam is pretty neat. I'd love a screensaver or rotating-desktop-background program or something.
posted by box at 7:03 AM on March 17, 2012

Stratocam is pretty cool. I can't figure out how the hell to do anything in ChronoZoom, the UI is horrible.
posted by Defenestrator at 2:05 PM on March 17, 2012

Re Chronozoom: Definition of boredom: waiting 7.5 billion years between the arrival of complex chemicals and the earth getting itself together.
posted by rongorongo at 3:41 PM on March 17, 2012

From Stratocam-- Is this a lego world?
posted by womprat78 at 2:54 PM on March 18, 2012