Sheikh writes his name in sand.... two miles wide

[Grumman]

@Jenaroph

I searched it out and it’s just not that big. There’s no way you could see it from space; Google Earth photos are taken from an airplane.

I’d think you would be able to see it easily from space. The ISS is only ~220 miles off the ground. It would be about equivalent to writing it an inch across and looking at it from 7-8 feet away.

[Colophon]

@septimus

I didn’t see a Google link or coordinates so spent some time looking for HAMAD myself. Here it is (upside-down with North at top).

Google Maps

(I’m a fan of short URLs, but don’t know which parameters here are inessential.)

Is there a good discussion soemwhere of Google’s Earth maps? I’m curious.

I live in a remote place where even the nearby town appeared on no map I was aware of other than certain unavailable maps used by government. Now there is a thoroughly labeled Google map. I was astounded to see our dirt driveway as a marked road and would have gotten paranoid, except our neighbor’s driveway was also marked.

The distant pics are from satellites, the close-up ones are from aircraft. You can usually see the “jump” in quality as you zoom in. Some areas only have satellite imagery, and you can’t go “high-res”.

E.g. see here. This spot has (not great quality, admittedly) aerial imagery. Scroll a little way to the north and you’ll see that runs out and there is only blurry satellite imagery, which looks OK when you zoom out.

As for the map detail, I believe Google users can add their own detail for roads etc, as a kind of open-source project. I know they do that a lot in third-world countries where there is not very good “official” mapping available.