Matthew D. Hancher

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Google Moon 3D

Tags: cartography, google, moon, nasa

In July of 2009, on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, the Moon joined Mars as a 3D experience in Google Earth. You can read all about it on the Official Google Blog and LatLong Blog posts. This work built on the 2D content we had produced for Google Moon in 2007 as well all the engineering that had gone into releasing Mars in Google Earth the previous year. 

This launch included the most sophisticated KML tour we'd yet built, all about Apollo 11, narrated by Buzz Aldrin. It also featured a tricky port to KML of the historical map browser that I had originally developed in JavaScript for the 2D moon.

And of course this new iteration of Google Moon presented us with a new and important challenge: where to hide the cheese. This time we decided ot hide it in plain sight, solving to UX problems at once.