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.

26°18’16.99″ S, 123°02’09.02″ E Lake Carnegie, an ‘ephemeral lake’ in WA (image scale: 10km across)	29°55’33.45″ S, 127°01’55.77″ E The endless Nullarbor plain of SA/WA (image scale: 112km across)
24°00’47.77″ S, 137°00’42.19″ E Fire-ravaged Simpson desert, NT (image scale: 38km across)	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.

Uluru in Google maps (zoom level 12)

Uluru in Google maps (zoom level 13)

Photo of Uluru (credit rplzzz, flickr)

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.

Supplementing the Australian portion of the Garmin USA base map

The Australian portion of the inbuilt US base-map appears to have been drawn on an etch-a-sketch by a blind monkey. This is a problem, especially as Garmin’s range of Australian map-packs are expensive and useless to anyone but soccer-mums ‘navigating’ to the local shopping centre.

Luckily the free Shonkymaps Australian map-set for Garmin contains full topographic 1:250,000 maps for the whole of Australia. Downloading these maps into your GPS is reasonably straightforward:

1. Ensure you have Garmin MapSource for windows (mac version coming soon apparently).
2. Download Shonkymaps direct or legally via bittorrent (you’ll save them 340mb of bandwidth).
3. Install Shonkymaps (needs to write to registry to comply with Garmin’s cockamamy MapSource system).
4. Shonkymaps can now be downloaded to your Garmin handset via MapSource just like any off-the-shelf Garmin map-set.

So how do Shonkymaps shape up? Well, see below for a comparison of their respective coverage of Moreton Island.

Google satellite image (left), Garmin base map (middle) & ‘Shonkymaps Full Topo’ (right)

Having a crack at geocaching

Wandering through the 60csx’s menu system (a habit with all new gizmos) I discovered a few features relating to geocaching (a never-ending decentralized global treasure-hunt game). As I’ll have some time on my hands over the break, I thought I’d give it a go. It turns out that setting up a Garmin GPS for geocaching is remarkably easy.

1. Install the Garmin Communicator browser plug-in (supports firefox, woot!).
2. Create a free account at geocaching.com, an online community which lists, manages and discusses everything related to geocaching.
3. The geocaching.com site can be a little hairy at times, but if you head straight to their geocache map search page you’ll find a dead-simple UI for locating geocaches in your area.
4. Once you’ve found a geocache you want to add, click it’s icon and a Google map balloon will appear containing the relevant details, including a ‘Send to Garmin link.

   

5. Click the ‘Send to Garmin’ link, ensure your GPS is connected to your PC and click ‘send’ on subsequent page.
6. Done! Here’s what the geocache waypoint info screen looks like. All the hard work’s done for us (except finding the actual cache)

In 60 seconds I had  half a dozen geocaches loaded on my GPS and due to the fact I wasn’t involved in typing the lat/long, there’s a fair chance they’ll be reliable. Now my only excuse for not finding them will be a lack of navigation ability