New York City Tourism in a Blink

By: Ray Liew
Recently, I came across a software which allows me to access great deal of satellite photos. Then an idea comes to my mind, I can perform some research with these satellite photos. If we have access to topographic maps, aerial photographs, together with the use of satellite photos and maps, we will be to make a great deal of landform research without leaving our homes.

This software which gives me the access to satellite photographs is Google Earth 3D. Although it is a free software, it also provides paid premium services. As a start, the free version is good enough for me as it already allows me to access the satellite images of great deal of cities (New York, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Paris, Singapore, and alot more) and places. I can even locate the house I'm staying in with Google Earth 3D. With the software, we can also tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings, providing even more flexibility for the research.

Besides displaying these satellite photographs, Google Earth 3D also let us find the distances between places, which is another big plus.

We can perform research on things like incoming roads, incoming water, outgoing water, incoming mountains around the places of our interests. These satellite photographs should provide us with great deal of information and idea of the places before we personally going down to perform even more refine research. The terrain feature and the ability to zoom in and out also allow us to perform analysis from the town aspect, or even from the city aspect. We can trace the rivers which run over a great deal of distances, the great mountains which link to the smaller mountains. There is some much we can do with this free resource.

Today's high tech resources have enable us to carry out even more research, and the access to these satellite photographs is definitely one of the fantastic resources out there.