... was Australia

Geocaching is a kind of game, where people hide little "treasures" somewhere
in the wild an publish the exact coordinates in the internet. To find one
you'll normally use a hand hold receiver for the satellite based Global
Positioning System. When you find a geocache you write your name into a log
book and may also exchange one of the little treasures contained in the
box. Finally you post your finds at 'www.geocaching.com'.

The treasure chest may be any kind of container, film canisters or tupper
boxes are the most common.

The idea to make something about geocaching came to me when I saw the
postings about Blue Marble and Tim Cook's "Australia" rendering.

The resources:
Basically Tim did the greatest part of the job, as I simply copied his idea
of making an f_sphere with functions of topographic and bathymetric data
from the NASA images. BTW my posting of an image of the NZers' Earth was
just a sphere. There I used the June photo of the earth as image_map and
the same image - after a Gaussian blur - as a bump_map.
From Tim was also the media for the athmosphere.

I didn't model the satellites much in detail as I only had some photos and
an artistic drawing of the GPS satellites from the homepage of
LockheedMartin. The satellites are CSG like the film Canister.

The image:
The film canister represents the first geocache ever - hidden in May 2000

camera points to the coordinates of the last cache found - at the time were
I looked it up: cache "Timber 200" in Columbus, Ohio.
The satellites from left to right (regardless their vertical position in the
pic) are over: The Caroline atoll (South Pacific), Ostrov Kotelny (an
Island north of Siberia), Cape Farvell (South Tip of Greenland), Istanbul
(Turkey of course), then comes our natural satellite and finally Cabo Verde
(west of Africa).

Rendering time without athmosphere (not shown): 10' 36'' for a 1024 x 768
pic, and with athmosphere (see below): 9h 52'05'' [Pentium 4, 2.67 GHz].


Maybe you like it.

Yours,
Bu.

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Preview of image 'geocache.jpg'

Hi!

Nice micro-cache!

I'm an happy geocacher since may 2005. I have 100 or so treasures found. 
I really like the sport. You can find my stats here:

http://www.geocaching.com/profile/?guid=27d6de59-171d-49c0-afdb-baee53730da6

You must be logged-on to ee it.

Nice art-work Burki, it gave me a smile this morning.

Ciao!

Mart




Burki wrote:
>    ... was Australia
> 
> Geocaching is a kind of game, where people hide little "treasures" somewhere
> in the wild an publish the exact coordinates in the internet. To find one
> you'll normally use a hand hold receiver for the satellite based Global
> Positioning System. When you find a geocache you write your name into a log
> book and may also exchange one of the little treasures contained in the
> box. Finally you post your finds at 'www.geocaching.com'.

Post a reply to this message

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Martin_B=E9lair?= <badhabit07.AT.hotmail.DOT.com> wrote:
> Hi!
> I'm an happy geocacher since may 2005. I have 100 or so treasures found.
> I really like the sport.


Salut Mart !

My  profile is at
http://www.geocaching.com/profile/?guid=a269d20a-2649-444f-80ee-79ff82efc6eb

I see, you have been much more busy than me. I cache only one and then. Your
speciality seems to be locationless caches, I never tried one.

Yours,
Bu.

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