satellite images
Google's headquarters: a field?
Now that I'm back in London I've been able to have a bit of a play around with the new Google satellite service I keep mentioning on here. It certainly is fun to play with, although it's not so much use to me as it would be to people in the US with the satellite images over the UK currently showing at a pretty low resolution. It is great to see they do have a global coverage though, and further to my comment the other week, you can now scroll around the whole globe and get back to where you started. Fantastic!
Whilst 'travelling' around the US I came across this satellite photo of Google's headquarters: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California. Only thing is, it seems Google's headquarters didn't exist when the image was taken, so it looks as though they're working out of a field. Or perhaps they're playing with us, taking a leaf out of the Whitehouse's book and altering the images - in their case to protect security.
Thinking about security I thought I'd take a look for Area 51 in the Nevada desert, just to see what it looked like from the air.
Before I even got to it though, I spotted this surreal landscape in San Francisco Bay, which it turns out others have pointed out too. It seems these beautiful (although abstract) looking features are actually salt pools full of algae.
Google Sightseeing
I discovered an interesting blog today called Google Sightseeing, a site which displays satellite images from around the world as found on the recently updated Google Maps service. The postings are broken down into a number of groups, I think the best of which is the 'weirdness' category. My favourite posting so far is this mind boggling image where two satellite photos taken from different angles have been stitched together to create a seamless - if slightly confusing - single image.
On a related note, this image on the Flickr photo sharing site is brilliant - it's the view an ordinary person on the ground gets when Google Maps pinpoints a spot nearby.
