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The illuminated continent
September 16, 2005
Posted by Michael Jones, Google Earth CTO
Have you ever dreamed of Africa while reading
National Geographic
? The exotic photographs and thoughtful articles take you there with a magical sense of place. Today we embraced that magic by releasing Google Earth data layers that index
National Geographic
stories, images, journals, and even a live webcam in Africa.
Just start
Google Earth
, enable the National Geographic layers, and begin exploring.
Across Africa, you will see the familiar yellow National Geographic logo. Zoom in to see the title of each feature article or photograph. Click the icon and a pop-up balloon shows a photo and description along with links to the content. Follow those links to read the entire story right where it happened. Not only will you learn about Jane Goodall's Fifi, you'll see her home. Joining the stories and images are layers for National Geographic Sights & Sounds multimedia resources, a live WildCam in Botswana, and a collection of Mike Fay's Megaflyover images.
The Megaflyover images are stunning. Mike spent more than a year taking 92,000 high resolution photographs of the continent. That project is described in
Tracing the Human Footprint
, an article in the September 2005
National Geographic
. He selected 500 of his favorite scenes of people, animals, geological formations, and signs of human presence and annotated them in Google Earth. Look for the red airplane icons as you fly over Africa. Each of these marks a spot where a high resolution image awaits your own personal voyage.
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