HeyWhatsThat – Calculate viewshed and panorama for any point on Earth

that is cool, the history url thing... hit back like a thousand times can't get out, I get the reason but still

I also love CalTopo, and this is a really cool feature. But once you switch to WireImagery, FATMAP gets you the same thing (but better).

this is AMAZING! It has really great detail for RMNP.

I wish it had lighting. The weather.gov lat/lon graphs has it I wonder if that is a free source or something better.

Snow depth too would be amazing

It's interesting how the simulated view makes errors in the terrain data obvious. The view from Santa Cruz island (off the coast of California) is almost completely obscured by single-pointed errors in the height map along the coast that didn't get cleaned from the data: https://caltopo.com/view#ll=34.0505,-119.8665&e=30&t=n&z=3&c...

wow this is cool!

but somehow the wireimagery setting doesn't work for any of the locations I've tried. it does work for the one you linked...

Edit: oh... picked a random location in the USA instead and there it works. So... no Europe? what's up with that?

Edit 2: also no south america apparently.

Mt. Diablo is in Contra Costa County, not Oakland.

The way of getting the land area of the viewshed from this presentation is not immediately obvious.

What about Mt. Taranaki?

https://www.heywhatsthat.com/?view=AVRM3QXH

Mostly ocean, but it seems to cover a wider area.

Off the top of my head, I'd figure Mt. Shasta must have a much larger viewable area than anything in the Bay Area.

Not to be flippant, but it's fascinating to think how an average airline passenger may trivially (and very approximately!) match or even beat such a land-based record simply by looking out the window at 40,000ft. *about twice Kilimanjaro's elevation, for the record.

Many semantics potentially apply, of course! But the principle is there. The principle that, for many decades now, humans have been matching the entire planet's largest natural viewshed, as a trivial matter of course during the everyday usage of technology, and barely even noticing most of the time...

Not to mention even higher bands, like PtP WiFi [1].

[1] https://www.nycmesh.net/

This is also going to be interesting for figuring out the minimum altitude for maintaining the link to an RC airplane for a given distance.

We actually added this as a feature to our sharing software at Plane Finder using our own modelling. If you sign up and then view your stats on the web you can compare your actual to the predicted. https://planefinder.net/coverage

It’s also baked into tar1090[1] which is a little more maintained of a package and pretty easy to get set up if you’ve got an SDR and 1090MHz antenna to track planes.

It’s a fun little hobby - where I live there really isn’t much of a reason to do it as there are enough other 1090MHz receivers in the area, but it still is cool when I look and see obscure jets flying overhead.

[1] https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090

I used to use PeakFinder, but then it was withdrawn and the free version disabled. Now it costs $5.

Thanks so much for sharing, their website has just helped me to better understand the horizon of my city.

https://www.peakfinder.org

I was just going to say the same. The mobile version is fantastic for when you're out in the field.

The AR feature is really nice.

Agreed. I climbed it 5 years ago, and immediately recognized the name.

In the early days of iOS there were tons of those apps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging#Wikipedia_article_g...

"""One of the first attempts to initiate the geotagging aspect of searching and locating articles seems to be the now-inoperative site Wikinear.com, launched in 2008, which showed the user Wikipedia pages that are geographically closest to one's current location.

The 2009 app Cyclopedia works relatively well showing geotagged Wikipedia articles located within several miles of ones location, integrated with a street-view mode, and 360-degree mode."""

Ah, well... To absent friends!

https://www.wired.com/2012/05/hands-on-nokia-city-lens-beta-...

GeoImageViewer, not an overlay but side-by-side view of photograph and maps. Clicking the image anywhere (not just precalculated pois) shows corresponding location in map and vice-versa. https://hdersch.github.io/

> I can never remember what the name of this site is when I need to use it. I should set up a redirecting domain.

Have we reached a world where this is easier than bookmarks?

Personally, I just look through all of my open tabs until I find the site I was looking for...

Why don't you create a bookmark with a name you can search on, like 'website used to do X that I always forget'?

I mentioned GeoImageViewer in a reply above. It contains several algorithms to determine the location of a landscape photo given some control points selected on a map. It is also able to determine lens parameters (fov, distortions,...). https://hdersch.github.io/

Not automated, that I know of.

However, you could replicate the functionality/outputs (for a given location) by using open source GIS software, any available free geospatial data, and basic long-established GIS techniques: the DEM, the cross section, and the viewshed.

I was thinking the same thing. I recently found apps that let you see the direction of sunrises and sunsets (as well as moon directions) for any given location, but you wouldn't really know if the view is obstructed.