What on Earth??

This blog is actually going to do a round the globe trip following roughly the 65th northern parallel. I will be traveling east starting from my own home town, the city of Oulu, Finland.

One of the main inspiration sources has been the Google Earth software, which I found pretty quickly after its publication about ten years ago. I feel myself really a veteran user of Google Earth and it would make a good topic for a blog article to describe the technical challenges posed by the relatively high processing load for the computer and net connection I used to have by then.

I know that there are numerous other blogs being authored of the discoveries people have made using just their home computers and Google Earth. I hope however that mine will be little different, since it will be geographically limited and eventually find its end point when my journey reaches my home again.

Everybody knows that the circumference of the Earth is roughly 40000 km and after a brief brush-up of my latent geometry skills I could calculate that the 65th parallel measures slightly more than 16900 km. Consequently the sun traverses about 705 km of our latitude each hour.

In order to fit the trip to 24 nice weekly episodes I must keep up with the pace of the sun, albeit in the opposite direction. Of course there will be stretches which are too monotonous to deserve a longer study. Also the other way around I may find myself stuck in some interesting area finding it very hard to depart again to continue my journey.

I will rely much also on the photographs many of the residents and tourists of these northern parts of the world have posted to the Panoramio photo service. Another beautiful feature, the Street View will be of very limited use for me, since my roads will most of the times go where the Google view recording cars have never gone.

By the way, there is also a similar topic in the Wikipedia article “65th parallel north”. You may want to read it for a starter to have an idea of what parts of the world my tour is going to visit.