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Google Earth can produce a side view just fine, it's just not designed for that so it can be tricky to get the position just right with the available controls.

And like I said, the reason I didn't do it here was because it hid the label on the horizon. But here it is:

https://earth.google.com/web/@36.43138439,78.74038717,4785.2...

But without the label you can't really tell what you're looking at. And the big problem is there's no "sideways" zoom like a telescope. Google Earth effectively treats zoom like altitude only.

In my experience while hiking tall things, the Google Earth view is accurate in terms of what you see, if you manage to get the viewpoint next to the ground like this. And you appreciate that the resolution is obviously limited.

by tombh7 hours ago|

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Do you think there's any way to automatically create these Google Earth links for each of the longest lines of sight on maps.alltheviews.world?

by crazygringo52 minutes ago|

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There has to be, since it seems to consist of what I assume are fairly straightforward parameters in the URL that encode position and direction.

Looking online, it seems to be:

  https://earth.google.com/web/@<lat>,<lon>,<alt>a,<range>d,<fov>y,<heading>h,<tilt>t,<roll>r

where <range> is the "distance from camera to target point".

Apparently the tricky part is placing a pin, which belongs to an encoded /data= parameter, and from what I gather nobody's discovered how to set that data.

It seems that it might be possible to dynamically generate a KML file which defines everything (including pins) using markup, but it's not clear if there's a way to pass that or encode it in a single link to Google Earth (as opposed to the user having to manually load it once in Google Earth). Google Maps is basically the same as Google Earth in the web interface, so there might be a way to do these things there.

So it's definitely possible to do something, but figuring out exactly how far you can go might take some experimentation.