Can you imagine to zoom in from outer space: all the way to the street where I live: For a while I was impressed by Google Maps - the way you can just drag them with your mouse. But today I discovered a whole new dimension to viewing satellite images - Google Earth. You can literally fly from one place on Earth to another (you zoom out all the way out into outer space, see Earth rotate to the direction of your destination, and zoom in up to the street level where you can see cars and people! You can drag the image and it will pan over redrawing the new area on the fly! You can change the viewing angle and see elevation. You can also display local attractions, restaurnats and hotels right over the images of the streets. This is suuuper cool. Since it's a stand-alone desktop application, as opposed to something that runs in your browser, Google Earth can take full advantage of your computer's hardware. Speaking of which, you do need to have a supped up computer to be able to run it effectively. Try it now! (Currently works on Windows only).

But there are good news and bad news. The good news is that areas such as New York City are mapped out very well. The bad news is that my hometown St. Petersburg, Russia only has part of it mapped out to high resolution. Also to find it, I had to enter Moscow in the search box and than pan over to St. Petersburg which is spelled on the map as Sankt-Peterburg (to match Russian spelling).