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October 30, 2005
I'm a big geek, but Google Maps & Google Earth are still cool
So, as is typical of Sunday evening (and really, just about every evening), Terry and I were watching Law & Order, specifically Criminal Intent. It was a repeat, but the interesting part was that the plot featured a sport called Geocaching. So I looked it up on the web. Apparently, there are "virtual caches" where you don't actually find anything, except the site itself. There was one pretty close the house, and I got the idea that I might be able to find it via satellite imagery...
First, I had to find my home latitude and longitude, in order to create an account on Geocaching.com. I stumbled around for a minute, then realized I'd used the latitude and longitude information when I used Mapbuilder.net. Once I had an account, I was able to find the coordinates of the cache. I popped them into mapbuilder, and seeing as how it was close to home, I knew what the prize was. I then thought "well, maybe I can actually *see* the prize if I use Google Earth. So I put the coordinates into Google Earth. I couldn't actually see the prize very well, but the shadow of it was fairly clear on the ground. Well, clear if you know what you're looking at.
Give it a shot - 39°57'30.49"N, 75°10'1.60"W or (39.958469, -75.167111).
Posted by Janice Ryan at October 30, 2005 10:50 PM
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