Talking Pyramids: Ancient Egyptian Pyramids

In relation to yesterday’s post, in which I talked about the use of 360Cities panoramas on the Giza pyramid field, I have just come accross a post on Ogle Earth by one of the photographers who created some of these spherical panoramas, Stefan Geens. I usually keep an eye out for any news on the archaeological use of Google Earth and ‘Digital Archaeology’ in general but some how I missed this one and only found it this morning while reading Andie Byrnes’ blog: Egyptology News, a must for any one interested in keeping up to date with all things Egyptological.

Stefan reports on his trip through middle Egypt with a group of Egyptology students from the Leiden and Leuven Universities. In his post he describes all the tools and applications that he used to document their travels and make them available on the web.

An excerpt from his post:

For the duration of our trip, I had a GPS unit in my rucksack, gathering data. I used a Garmin Oregon 300, which proved to be very robust and doggedly determined to stay locked onto its satellites — often even well into a rock tomb, with just a small opening to the sky. It would eat a pair of AA batteries per day, and every evening I also made sure to save the day’s readings into a track. Because I had a laptop with me, I also backed up the data to my Mac daily using the free LoadMyTracks, saving both GPX and KML versions of the data. The Garmin can keep multiple days of readings in its memory before filling up, but I wanted a redundant set of data.

At the start of the trip I made sure to calibrate the time on my GPS with the time on my camera, and then took pictures and 360-degree panoramas at will. (I’ve already written up how I make my panoramas.)

Once home, I georeferenced my photos using the free GPSPhotoLinker for the Mac. I gave it all the GPX files I had from the trip — GPSPhotoLinker seamlessly collated them, and then batch-processed the photos to a time-weighted average of the closest track points. After editing them in Aperture for Mac, I uploaded a subset to Flickr using the FlickrExport plugin. Flickr can read the EXIF coordinate metadata, so all the photos in the trip’s Flickr set are georeferenced. I also wrote detailed captions for each uploaded photo.

I then used Adam Franco’s still unique (to my knowledge) Flickr Photo Set to KML web app to create a KML file that references the Flickr photos in the set, and also shows their captions. The app works well but hasn’t been updated in a while, so the resulting KML needed some tweaking, for example to make sure it references the newer default Google Earth icons.

Turning to the 360-degree panoramas: Once I was happy with them, I exported a 100% quality full-size JPEG of each panorama — weighing in at 32MB and around 12,000×6,000 pixels per file — and uploaded these to my account at 360Cities. For each photo, 360Cities lets you select its location on a map, either by dropping a pin on a Google Map or by entering the exact coordinate data. As you can zoom in a lot closer on the imagery in Google Earth than on Google Maps, I made accurate new placemarks for them in Google Earth and then copied their coordinates into 360Cities.

You can read his post and download the Google Earth KMZ files here:
Middle Egypt trip report – the Google Earth version
Further Notes

You can also read Stefan’s more recent post: Geotagging tools for Lightroom, Aperture: An update

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Tags: satellite, technology