Recently an American friend of mine was asking about the basics of Australia’s geography over lunch. When I couldn’t make my points clearly using condiments and cutlery I turned to the Google Earth iPhone app (also worth a look is Earthscape). I find myself reaching for the iPhone mid-conversation quite frequently these days. Though awkward (or rude) in a 2 person chat, I find judicious interrogation of the inter-tubes dramatically elevates casual debates, planning sessions and meandering conversations between 3+ people (which this was).
Australia in Google Earth iPhone app
Anyway, the conversation inevitably turned to questions about ‘the outback’, the facet of Australian life which seems to intrigue other nationalities most. Questions typically follow the “Did you live in the outback?” “Have you been there?” “What is it?” “Pet kangaroo?” line (No, not sure, umm, dog person). My difficulty in answering ‘outback’ related questions is that, like most Aussies I know (other South-East Queensland types), I have no firm definition of ‘the outback’ to go on. I’ve camped in some arid and desolate spots (by European and American standards) in Australia (technically not ‘outback’ due to their proximity to the coast), but I’ve never been close to or ‘beyond the black stump‘, let alone into the ‘Never Never‘.
Living in a a disconcertingly rainy country has made me think about the Australia’s arid interior more and more. To keep my hands busy during a skype chat this morning, I fired up the Google Earth desktop client to check out Google’s satellite imagery resolution for the Australian interior. Not bad as it turns out, particularly in areas in the many stripes of 60cm DigitalGlobe imagery (red-tinged for some reason). Even in areas covered by the lower resolution CNES Spot satellite images, the novelty of being able to make out individual trees soon gives way to wonder at the strange patterns visible from space.
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22°21’04.26″ S, 128°58’56.72″ E
Massive Lake Mackay, Great Sandy Desert, WA/NT (image scale: 111km across, rotated) |
Wind, water, sand, salt, erosion and fire have all shaped the interior with scant evidence of human existence. In particular, note that the Nullarbor shot above covers an area roughly 112km x 63km with no buildings, rivers, lakes or hills. Now that’s desolation!
Whilst assembling the above screen-grabs I noticed that Google Maps seems to use a different database of satellite imagery than Google Earth at zoom levels below 13. This leads to a slightly odd disconnect when viewing Uluru in google maps at zoom level 12 and then zooming once to view Uluru at zoom level 13.
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Photo of Uluru (credit rplzzz, flickr)
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True to form, the wordpress team had managed to release several point releases since my last post, making this the 3rd post in a row preceded by a wordpress upgrade. My goal is to have the next post up before WordPress 2.7 hits. I’m doomed.