Sightseeing by Satellite

So I’m messing around on Google Maps recently. It turns out that the more you look for, the more amazing things you find.

I initially started out browsing places I had been. Searching for a big shopping centre in Los Angeles, I came across an airliner seemingly parked in the car park.

Of course it’s actually several thousand feet up, most likely going in to our out of John Wayne airport, but it got my interest going.

Next up was a quick flick at Frankfurt, where a scan of the airport revealed an even more bizzare photographic anomaly – a 747 caught climbing out of the airport, snapped three times in succession by the satellite. Not that I’m that much of a geek, but I guess that this would give you the frame rate of the satellites that Google uses if you could be bothered to do the maths.

Having found that, it just became a general sightseeing mission. First up, Murrayfield (the Scottish Rugby ground), captured in pretty impressive high resolution:

From Edinburgh, on to some of the Middle East’s finest sights – the great Pyramids at Giza:

And the Ka’bah at Mecca, Saudi Arabia:

The nutsoid Burj Al Arab hotel on the coast of Dubai (the one that looks like a sail):

And some European highlights, including Venice:

And down the coast of Italy, the near perfect volcanic cone of Vesuvius:

The Eiffel Tower, in Paris

And on the European historic tip, the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin. If you open the link and zoom in, you can clearly see the line of bricks paved in the semi-circular road that mark the actual line of the removed Berlin Wall.

I hereby release myself from all claims should you become addicted to zooming in and out of places that you have or haven’t been!