Google Earth Flight Simulator And Sky

Today Eric tested on my computer (at the same time as showing it to me for the first time) both the flight simulator and sky functionalities of the newest version of Google Earth. To download the newest version you can follow this link.

The sky feature is activated by the last toolbar item on the Google Earth toolbar and it switches the view from the Earth imagery to imagery of the stars and galaxies. When in that mode other layers show up that aren’t all the layers for the Earth imagery. A key example is showing or not showing the constellations. This mode in Google Earth also has some useful articles on Galaxies and the life of stars. You can also search for any constellation or galaxy and it’ll take you to that location.

Then, hidden with no direct connection there is the flight simulator feature in Google Earth. To activate this feature press command (apple)-option-A. From here on out there’ll be a menu item in the Tools menu to activate this feature. The window that pops up is the starting window for the simulator. Here you choose what aircraft you fly, what airport to fly from (or to start at your current location), and what controller to use (keyboard or joystick). The joystick we have here worked on my MacBook but didn’t work on our old PPC iMac. The controls are quite complicated, so instead of mentioning them all here I’ll just point you off to Google’s help page that explains them clearly. I could barely control the plane I was attempting to fly. Enjoy, Alex.