h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Oh well, if you insist.

52°4'43.41"N 4°19'57.95"E

Oh, and here's a human shield in Iraq:

33°16'36.54"N 44°25'37.43"E

Do you want the interdimentional portal as well?


Geggs

Yes please...

Here you go then, it's not far from the sunbather, to be honest.

52°13'50.36"N 5°10'9.69"E

Oh, and here's a giant earwig terrorizing German farmland:

48°51'27.79"N 10°12'21.25"E



Geggs

By the way, I've just found something that I can't indentify. In the middle of Greenland. It doesn't look like it's possible to see all of it, but what you can see is over 50 miles long.

70°32'25.33"N 40° 4'22.16"W

Any ideas?


Geggs

I can't get Google Earth on this computer, but are you talking about this?

http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&hl=en&ie=UTF8&om=1&z=5&ll=68.640555,-43.989258&spn=9.306698,25.356445

It looks like a place where they ran out of sellotape when they were sticking all the aerial photos together.

Yes, that's it. The orange smudge rather than the black line. It seems to have a thin line of yellow along the northern edge, look vaguely like a boat resting on it's side, and rusting slightly.


Geggs

I think what you're looking at there is the join between two photos...

The South west image would have been taken through heavy cloud, in summer, with gap in the cloud showing bare rock below - the NE side taken at a different moment when the cloud cover was heavier.

I can clearly see my apartment's roof 40 37' 08.77 N
74 02'09.27 W

But when I 'fly' over the UK there are no clear images of houses or buildings.

Fair enough. Quite an interesting looking bit of rock, though...



Geggs

Have you lot seen this?

http://www.isoma.net/games/goggles.html

Dutch sunbather

I got into GE when I was researching an h2g2 University Project on the world's biggest machines. Here's a picture of the Antonov An-225 Myria, the worlds largest aircraft.

50 35 20.67 N 30 12 22.04 E

Here's an odd one:

22 10 25 N 159 39 27 W






Now that's a wave!

If we are into big things, then this, I am told, is a Bora, the world largest military hovercraft:

44°36'58.93"N 33°33'20.10"E

And this is a huge a*se:

53°21'51.77"N 1°20'2.97"W


Geggs

Ok, seeing as we're looking at big things...

64°34'52.32"N 39°48'47.16"E

One seriously large submarine!

Something that troubles me about GoogleEarth is the inaccuracy of either the provided placemarks or of the latitude and longitude (I'm not sure which is in error)

For example, the World Heritage Site Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is here: 49 42 20.89 N 113 39 15.61 W but the community marker is here: 49 44 57.67 N 113 37 28.02 W

And the marker for the small Italian town, Ruoti is here: 40 42 53.09 N 15 41 27.09 but the town is actually a little further west: 40 43 06.92 N 15 40 42.59 E

I've noticed this pretty much everywhere.

I wonder whether poeple are placing markers a little to the side of the proper place, so that you can get a go look at it without the marker being in the way. Of course, that does mean that you have to know what the place of item in question looks like from the air to start with....

Oh, and I've just found this. I knew the river turned bad towards London, but I didn't think it was this abrupt:

51°28'39.35"N 0°13'52.65"E


Geggs

Could be that the 'community markers', which, after all, are put in by anyone and their dog, were put in place before certain areas were covered by hi-res photos - for instance, on the h2g2 users google map, when I put a marker in showing my location there was only a low-res map of this part of France, so when I look at it now I'm actually a couple of streets out and living in a museum apparently.

I suspect that the community markers are out of place partly due to the resolution transition but I also wonder if some have been placed according to real world latitude and longitude which doesn't always match GoogleEarth coordinates. I mean, the Head-Smashed-In one is over 5 kilometers out of place.

Oh, and here's an interesting effect - when they join two photos together that were taken from different angles you sometimes get some pretty wierd looking images...

Takes some time to figure out when you first look at it - but all the buildings in this section of New York seem to be falling into a crack in the earth...

40°46'11.24"N 73°58'6.84"W

And there appears to be a massive phone port just down the road

40°45'59.54"N 73°57'44.34"W


Geggs