Viewing Satellite Data Fun

Instead of ending poverty, the government definitely has its priorities straight when it spends millions of dollars on cool software like World Wind. This powerful program lets you rotate and zoom in on the Earth (with 1m resolution in the US). And it's only 170mb!

Zooming takes a while as it has to download the data - AND this program takes a ton of CPU power (it slows down my Athlon 2600+ to a slow pace).

Here is an image of a place where I got left off when I was hitch-hiking from Indiana to Seattle. It is in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, inside North Dakota near the Montana border. I ended up camping and spending the night nearby.

I hiked up the ridge (an altitude gain of around 250 feet) on the right side of the cross-hairs, and hiked down about 200 pixels to the left of the cross-hairs. You can see it looks like there'd be a stream there (and it was kind of muddy) -- there was a real stream with water much further to the right. You can see I-90 slightly below the crosshairs with exits and entrances.