Support linking out to Google Earth or similar

[tombh]

u/crazygringo on HN thinks we may be able to reconstruct the Google Earth URL for a line of sight with something like:

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 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.