The Generate a Panorama site lets you generate high-quality panorama views, with labeled peaks, for some areas of Europe, Asia, and Africa; moving your mouse cursor over the “Covered areas in Europe, Asia and Africa” link near the top of the page shows the coverage area:
You have three options for setting the peak location:
- Clicking directly on the map to set the location, then adjusting the direction of view.
- Choosing peaks from a searchable list
- Entering the exact latitude/longitude, and also setting camera height, distance, viewing angles and more.
As you adjust the position and parameters, you get a mini-preview of the view at lower-right:
When everything is set, you have the option of either emailing a copy of the panorama to yourself or someone else, or viewing it in the browser:
Peaks are clickable, and you can choose to have a peak location highlighted either in Google Maps, or the Google Earth browser plugin:
There’s also a “Telescope 10x” option to blow up a section of the panorama, but I couldn’t get that to work.
Data resolution is 1 arc-second (30 meters) for the Alps, and 3 arc-second (90 meters for the rest of the world). Hopefully, the rest of the world will be covered at some point in the future. The panoramas look better than the ones generated by the HeyWhatsThat site, but that site offers worldwide coverage, and additional features like viewshed export to Google Earth.
“There’s also a “Telescope 10x” option to blow up a section of the panorama, but I couldn’t get that to work.”
Click on the panorama and a red rectangle will appear. Place the rectangle on the part of the panorama you want to zoom in to. Then press the tiny “ok” button in the bottom-right corner of the rectangle.
This will open a new window (perhaps your ad-blocker is stopping this?) with the selected area.
Hope this helps.
Jeroen
Thanks, Jeroen. I tried this, and got a popup window with a cryptic web address and error message, not a zoomed view.