Google Earth - Recommended Free Download

Several years ago I looked at an application called Google Earth, a program which allows you to view literally any corner of this Earth from satellite imagery without even leaving your desktop. This is genuinely one of the most interesting applications that you will ever use and bizarrely, it is completely free of charge.

I was prompted to revisit this piece of software for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the map data has been completely updated and so whereas before the level of detail for Torbay and the surrounding areas was a little poor, you can now get right down to street level - I was even able to pick up the pot plants on the roof of Refresh. Additionally the Herald Express have kindly agreed to let me use pictures in future articles and because a picture is apparently worth a thousand words, I thought more would be encouraged to download it by seeing the application in action.

Google Earth can be downloaded free of charge from http://earth.google.com and because all of the satellite imagery is streamed directly from the Internet the application itself is a tiny 13mb in size. When you first start up the application, you will be presented with a picture of the Earth, as it is viewed from space. From here you can fully manipulate how you view this globe by either dragging it in order to rotate to a different continent or zooming in so that you can look closer at a particular area.

The most remarkable aspect in my opinion is that it is all works faultlessly; so if you zoom in to Paignton for instance you just turn the globe to the UK and then begin zooming in and then as you get nearer adjust your course so that you are looking the West Country, then Torbay before you get down to street level. It would have been much simpler for Google to control your view in set stages, from 20,000km altitude right down to the closest zoom level of 8m but instead they allow you to zoom metre by metre which is more than welcome.

Almost all parts of the world have been covered, and as a result if you look out in to the middle of the Sahara desert or Antarctica they are all beautifully compiled by satellite imagery. Even though they areas all look similar to the naked eye from above, but it is still remarkable that the satellites have captured the entire planet.

There are search facilities built in to the application so you can quickly and easily locate a certain area, postcode or landmark and rather just giving you the imagery, Google Earth also highlights areas of interest. These can either consist of photographs, Wikipedia articles, information gathered from the Internet such as local business information or even representations of the buildings that you're seeing in 3D.

Rather remarkably you can flip the view around so that you're viewing the sky from your current position on the Google Earth map and explore the universe using exactly the same interface and it's at this point where the power of this application really does start to sink in. You are sat on your computer, using a free 12mb application and suddenly you can view any place on this Earth or if you'd prefer, take your pick of millions of stars and galaxies.... incredible.