Google Earth

Its quite possible that I am the last balloon pilot to do this.

Its drizzling here, looks set in so I have been looking for weather charts, satellite pictures, you know the drill.

Well I spotted, "weather" as a tab on google earth the other day and I selected it tonight.

I then found yet another reason to loose too much time on google earth.

Looking at the cloud formations around the earth was stunning.

Now if I was in a more civilized part of the world I see it would also offer me a radar overlay as well.

Flipping handy for seeing lines of storms develop in a more, um intuitive way. Well you can zoom in and out to your hearts content and see how parts of the weather system relate to the rest.

Will it make forecasting tommorrows passenger flight easier?? I doubt it.

But it looks way cool.

Gary Mortimer, in the drizzle South Africa.

Help find Steve Fossett 2

Seems like it is for real and a very good idea, each user is presented with one image to review. All using something called amazon mechanical turk, no doubt something a stack of balloonists are about to learn about.

More upto date images for google earth http://s3.amazonaws.com/fossett/geoeye-color.kml

Happy hunting, would be amazing if this overtook the work of several aircraft and high tech equipment.

Spread the word amongst your ballooning friends.

G