See Jos, Nigeria and surroundings on Google Earth

(reposted from my old blog site; first posted 5 Oct 2008)

Until earlier this year, you would not see much if you looked for Jos on Google Earth. It was barely more than a smudge on the very low resolution satellite photos. That has changed, though — now you can count the trees in our yard and see the lines on the tennis court by our house. By loading the Jos data file for Google Earth I’ve made, you can see (in Google Earth) many of the main places in Jos and surrounds: the university, the old, burned out market, the zoo, Hillcrest school, Miango, Bezer home, and many other sites. (Unfortunately, the elevation information isn’t accurate, so you won’t see many of the hills in 3-D.)

If you already have Google Earth installed on your computer, you can simply click on the link above and choose to run the file with Google Earth, or to save the file somewhere and then click on it later to load it into Google Earth.

If you don’t yet have Google Earth, you can get it (free) athttp://earth.google.com/download-earth.html. I think it’s about 12 MB in size. The program runs best on a high-speed connection, since it’s constantly downloading photo views as you move around, but you can probably get some use from it even with a dial-up connection.

Once you’re up and running with the Jos data file, you can use the sidebar controls  to turn on or off the various features. For example, you can turn off all the roads, or turn off everything and then select individual features to see. You can double-click on the place marks to go directly to them. Use the mouse to drag the view, the shift-right-arrow and shift-left arrow to rotate, and the shift-up-arrow and shift-down-arrow to tilt the view. You can zoom with the mouse wheel or the page-up and page-down keys. Check the complete list of keyboard shortcuts or view the users’ guide.

Two warnings: first, Google Earth can be very addicting! You can go view the landscape and sites anywhere in the world. Want to see what Kabul looks like? Just type “Kabul” into the search box and off you go. Zoom, pan, tilt, view the hills and roads … and before you know it your evening is gone. The second warning is that all this does take up bandwidth. It probably won’t make a difference unless you’re somewhere like Nigeria where the connections are very expensive. The good news is that Google Earth saves the images onto your computer, so you can go back and see them again without having to download them again.

Have fun!