The Earth Is Square

Had a notebook go to crap on me last week.. refused to boot, refused to be seen when mounted as a USB external drive.. Figured all the data was lost. But a friend on IRC pounted me to Trinity Rescue Kit (http://trinityhome.org/trk/) to try. So I did and damned if it didn't work and I could see the HD contents so I was able to dump the data onto my thumb drive.

Though I couldn't fix the bad sectors on the drive (unless I was doing that wrong) I was able to at least recover data.

Then I spent a fun saturday formatting, fdisking, scandisking and reinstalling and got the notebook back to working order.

That concludes today's infomercial

Had several people ask just how big Olympus Mons is.. it seems peole just can't relate to the scale of it's size. So, I pulled these images together to help show.

I couldn't get a good enough Earth / Mars 3D comparison for height though.

Here is an image of Olympus Mons and I measured the rough diameter of the mountain:

Now, using just about the same height, here is an image of Spain with the width of Olympus Mons shown:

As you can see, Spain is just larger than the base of Olympus Mons. But in case you still can't really grasp it.. check this overlay out then:

As you can see in this image, Spain is almost entirely covered.

And since I was a little bored I give you the NEW Earth region of 'Mount Spain'

In World Wind release 1.3.3 we were given three flavors of Moon imagery. This imagery was amazing, not only could you see imagery of the Moon.. you could see imagery of the Moon in 3D! How can you top that? Simple. Imagery of Mars in 3D!

Now with the "Coming Soon" release of World Wind 1.3.4 it looks like we could get a whole new planet to look at in 3D. (Or NWW could be evil and make us wait to 1.5's release) Currently it is in "test mode" and is only three datasets. The 3D data, MDIM and Mola Colored.

MDIM Imagery is about 200m resolution (meaning an object would have to at least be 200 meters across to take up 1 pixel). MOLA is the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter satellite. Also coming will be a color version of the Mars imagery.

Viewing the Martian Imagery

We will start this mini tour by looking at Olympus Mons, the largest volcano known in our solar system. You can see from the above image, it stands out quite well on Mars. And on this page you can see it is almost larger than Arizona.

Zooming in closer to the volcano.

In this view you can see that Olympus Mons amost fills the World Wind window. But you can still get closer and see more detail!

At this level of zoom we have the craters and caldera of the volcano's summit clearly in view. It is amazing to see the level of detail in this imagery and to have it as one source so you don't have to open image after image after image.

But now lets look at the mountain in 3D...

Here is what the mountain would look like if you were flying by at commercial jet altitude:

Still wondering about the scale of this volcano? Check this image which is a 3D view but from further away so that you can see the curve of the planet.

That, is one VERY large volcano. and quite worth of it's title of "Largest Volcano in the Solar System" (that we know of).

But Olympus Mons isn't the only amazing feature to be seen on Mars. Checkout the following images of some of the crater fields on Mars:

And now a crater field view in 3D:

If you are keen of eye, you can see that just inside the World Wind window is the edge of a very large crater with several impact craters inside of it.

The last bit of imagery we will look at is the Mola Colored. For more detailed information.. check the MOLA NASA page. MOLA uses a laser to make a 3D topographical map of the Martian surface. And this is a colorized rendition of the Mars data:

You have seen something quite similar when you have looked at the World Wind Moon imagery.

You can download the test file for the Mars data here and to install you unzip into the {WorldWindInstall}/Config folder

I'll post more on this imagery as more information comes out and more imagery is added.

Getting closer to finishing this historical earthquake plug-in..

I have it sorting quakes by depth now. As you can see in this image:

I have four shapes for the quake depths:

Circle = shallow quakes
Triangle = moderate depth quakes
Square = deep quakes
Star = Ultra deep quakes

I am just working on the coloring now so they are not all one color. First (newest) 1/3rd will be red, oldest 1/3rd will be green and the middle 1/3rd will be yellow.

Just getting the code to do that is the tricky bit for a non-pro coder:)