I just took a look at Versailles. Magnificent. I never would have tought to look, but some other teacher mentioned it in passing.
What are your favorite Google Map images?
I like trying to hunt down famous geographical landmarks without using country boundaries… things like victoria falls and ayers rock. I’m usually pretty sucky but I’m getting better!
My favorite is the university my daughter attended while she was studying in Japan. Japanese addresses have little correlation to actual location, I didn’t have latitude/longitude coordinates and I had never seen an aerial view of the campus. Really, it was the thrill of just locating the place more than any visual attractiveness.
In the satellite view, I can zoom in on my house, and I can see my truck in my driveway.
I’ve never really played around with it other than to try to find friends’ houses.
I look for roads that cross the border between countries that drive on opposite sides of the road, and try to find out how they implement the crossover. So far the best one I have found is at the border between Macau and mainland China (no coords at the moment, sorry). That road does seem to have an unnecessarily complex looping structure, but it’s quite clear that traffic comes out on the other side.
I find it interesting to see which national boundaries are visible “on the ground” as it were.
The US-Canada boundary has a clear swathe cut through the trees, even in the backwoodsiest of backwoods areas, marching ruler-straight up mountains, across valleys, even on tiddly islands and promontaries in lakes.
The USA-Mexico border is also pretty easy to trace along much of its length, as there’s a dirt road used by border patrols, I guess.
This is a 90-degree turn in the border between Namibia and Botswana.
There are lots more.
Heehee! I found my village! It took a few attempts because Google and I disagree on how to spell it in Latin letters, but you, too, can see where I live if you search for “Pavel Banja, Bulgaria”. My village is in a valley and it’s really neat to see the mountains rising to the north and the…not-quite-mountains to the south.
While looking for this (and being unable to find it due to not knowing exactly where is the border), I came across this - it’s a working airport, but the interesting thing is that when you zoom out to the satellite image, it’s still only half built.
Well, this is related - see this thread about a bike race we are tracking in Google Maps.
Now I’m looking at downtown Chicago and it’s making me hugely homesick. What’s going on at Soldier Field? It looks like the whole north end of the stadium has been demolished.
I have a thing for what I call “sprawl 'round the world” - suburban North American/Australian-style development in the most unlikely of places.
Suburban Windhoek, Namibia:
http://img468.imageshack.us/img468/598/windhoekex9.jpg
Ghost subdivisions in the Western US are also fun to discover
El Paso, Texas:
http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/342/ghost01hl3.jpg
Belen, New Mexico:
http://img523.imageshack.us/img523/7573/ghost02dw2.jpg
Following North Korean freeways and finding myself fascinated at the lack of traffic, and the gawd-awful geometry and design – they can build a nuclear bomb, but they can’t build an interchange designed to handle traffic at speeds above 15 km/h – can be a fun diversion. Some NK freeways continue into snow-covered mountains unplowed; the road surface is reduced to ruts.
That is interesting, I wonder why that happens.
It was embarrasing how long it took me to find Mt Everest. The biggest freakin’ mountain in the world and I could not find it even though I knew it was on the Nepal-Tibet border…I even had geographical locations (or equal) checked. This was on Google Earth by the way.
Um, because the satellite images are older than the more detailed aerial shots? It happens in lots of places. Sometimes it’s the other way round, and new buildings disappear when you zoom in closer.
elmwood, those “ghost subdivisions” are weird. Did they mark out all the roads and then abandon building? Or were the photos taken while they were still laying out new housing? The ghost roads kind of look like they’ve been there a while and have started to go back to nature.
Also, interestingly, all of them in this area seem to be called “La Entrada Road”!
The images come from a number of different sources; generally speaking, satellite photography for the zoomed-out views and stitched aerial photography for the closer, more detailed stuff. The different layers of photography are not time-synchronised, usually this manifests as nothing much more than clouds that disappear when you zoom in or different lighting conditions.
If you look at Bikini Atoll, you can see the crater left by the Bravo Castle Hydrogen Bomb test. It’s in the northwest section.
I looked at Truk lagoon and saw a bunch of wrecked japanese ships. Not as exciting as I’d hoped since there’s not much detail and you can’t see the fully submerged ones. Same with Iwo Jima.
Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho is cool if you zoom out far enough to see the full extent of the lava flows. I followed the Blue Ridge Parkway using the oblique angle view. Pretty cool.
Portsmouth Naval Base is cool since you can see HMS Warrior, Victory and modern warships. In fact, I re-visited many of the sites from my vacations in England. What a difference it makes when it’s a place you’ve been to before.
I noticed that Google uses the imagery my county generated after hurricane Charlie paid a visit. I use that imagery every day at my job. And you guys want to see the mother of all ghost subdivisions, lookup “Lehigh Acres, FL.” Approximately 132,000 lots (I had to count them) of which about a fifth are occupied.
If you’ve never been, I recommend Google Sightseeing.
Are they perhaps using an image from several years ago taken while Soldier Field was being renovated/rebuilt/converted into the spaceship looking thing it is now?
I love the drive from Shoshoni, Wyoming, through the Wind River Canyon to Thermopolis. Whenever I feel lonely for Wyoming, I go to Google Maps and take a drive.
It’s fairly obvious what’s going on here, but it’s still pretty odd to look at.
Hi everyone, pardon the slight highjack; is there any way to get Google maps to tell you Latt & Long. of a given point on a map? I know you can enter them as coordinates, but can you get them back out?