This offers some tools and ideas for quicker production of your locally focused Powers of Ten. The original tutorials are now a few years old and there have been both changes within Google Earth and new tools have been created (or brought to our attention) that make the process simpler.

1. 1.The steps described below are also shown in the video at the bottom of the page. You may wish to watch the video before reading these steps.
   

2. 2.A site with many useful tools for VFE production is gpsvisualizer.com. For making our Powers of Ten, we’ll use the range rings tool on their calculators page. Range rings are circles around a point on a map that show everything within a certain range -- it’s simply a circle of that radius. Through gpsvisualizer’s range ring tool, you can create a set of range rings around your location almost instantly.
   

3. 3.Copy the latitude and longitude into the box labeled: Lat., Lon. In this example, I’ll use Balanced Rock at Wisconsin’s Devil’s Lake State Park as the center point. I’ve set the preferences in Google Earth so that latitude and longitude are shown in decimal degrees. The latitude of Balanced Rock is about 43.415957° N and the longitude is about 89.724512°. When stating coordinates in decimal degrees, Northern latitudes are positive, and Southern are negative; and Eastern longitudes are positive and Western are negative. So, what goes in the the lat., lon. box for our example of Balanced Rock is: 43.415957, -89.724512.
   

4. 4.In the box labeled, “Radius,” cut and paste the following: 5m, 50m, 500m, 5km, 50km, 500km
   

5. 5.That will produce a series of range rings, each with a diameter equal to the size of the side of the squares you’ll draw.
   

6. 6.Use the polygon tool (as shown in the video) to draw your squares.