 on how to download install and use Google Earth Pro on desktop Google Earth recently released a very nice and sleek browser interface for for their platform but their desktop software is extremely powerful it's known as a GIS geographic information software and it's probably one of the easiest types of the software to use and to create professional looking maps with so we're going to introduce it and talk about it if you don't already have it installed on your computer you go to this website here and download it and install and once you do that you can open it up it looks like a gray Earth says start Google Earth Pro and that will that will bring up software and it usually comes with some level of hints and in different ways you can use the software effectively and you have to have an internet connection still even though this isn't browser based because they are feeding a lot of the aerial photography and elevation all the other types of data through the internet it's not all on stored on your machine so here is the view that comes up and you can zoom in and out of the area using your mouse cursor wheel and if you hold down your mouse button and then drag your mouse around it will drag you plan it around into different views and so you can also control those zoom features with these little buttons on the side here and they'll change your perspective so it's just playing around with those and if you ever need to get back to north orientation you can just double click on this little compass here on the north part and it will reorient you in the right direction so one of the most powerful parts about a GIS is these layers and you can add many different layers of information to to get an idea what's going on in an area in a mapped area the default layers that Google provides are borders and labels and places the photos layers changing now but they're still providing some some level of photos and then roads then you can turn 3d buildings on and off and this feature is available for some of the larger cities or it will show you the buildings and then you can also turn terrain on off and definitely suggest you have terrain on at all times because turning it off basically flattens out your view and I'll show you here so that's what you get when you turn terrain off and then you can add your own places so I already have some of these places filled in here and any kind of KML or KMZ dot KML drop KMZ file can be loaded into this map and I I have a module some KMZ files from my online geology class I can turn those on and off if you double click on a feature a layer in that it will zoom you to the extent of that layer and you can view it it doesn't look like it's wanting to show up really well right now that's what the big giant red X is but that is the different places and then you can search for new places their example has an address you can also search for latitude and longitude that's a little picky and how you do that if you know random latitude and longitude and it will bring you right to it so searches for both place names and and coordinates as long as you type the coordinates in right you can also add your own features to the map if you want to add that so I can turn layers on and off just by clicking these little check boxes here and I can expand them and see more information about those layers and I want to make my own I can use these buttons up here and there's all kinds of interesting things you can add I will just do place marks from for now and here you can add a little point in the default is this little push pin you could make your own label and change the colors and do all kinds of the fancy things and then you can see that there and you can even save it as a KML file so and get directions all kinds of other features so that this is a very feature rich relatively intuitive software right here another really nice feature about Google Earth Pro is this this time slider if you click on this it'll bring up this little bar here and notice has dates on it and here's the most current imagery but you can drag it around to different imagery dates that will show you historical imagery for that area if it's available so that's a really useful tool to look at older scenes if you want to see how things change over time or something like that and then another tool that I use very frequently is this little ruler-shaped tool here it's a measuring tool you can measure distances between roads you can also measure you know how long a path might be and measure out the path many different line segments you can also create a polygon which is a just like a shape measure out the area of that polygon there's all kinds of nice measurement features that you can use so that is it for a very brief introduction to Google Earth Pro I definitely recommend you using it it's very nice free software especially if you are interested in in making maps or just examining the terrain doing some GIS type measurements and things like that so thank you very much