Google Sightseeing takes you on tour of the world as seen from satellite, using the free Google Earth program, or Google Maps in your web browser. Each weekday your guides James and Alex present new weird and wonderful sights as suggested by readers.

The editors: James & Alex

Pixel Fields

Posted by Alex Turnbull, Tuesday, 19th April 2005

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This is an awful lot of fields… scroll around for a bit - there’s thousands! And from all the way up here, it looks like some sort of cool pixel-art.

Which might perhaps explain why the farmers chose Pac-Man as their new subject matter when they got bored of rectangles!

Square Fields

Thanks go to Seth for Pac-Man. Cheers mate, geek-tastic!

Oh, there’s also combination rectangles and circles, sent to us by Mik :-)

11 Responses to 'Pixel Fields'

  1. thomas says:

    Anyone caring to know why there are these Pac-Man shapes:
    These fields are irrigated from a giant arm stretching from the center of the field outwards, forming a radius of a circle. That arm deposits water in the amount of an average rainfall (typically a little over an inch) over a certain number of days (depending on the plants) by circling the field. this is why there are certain fields that have small, greener wedges in them (where the arm has passed by recently, indicating more recent growth) and in this case, a ‘field within a field’ where there is a smaller, differently irrigated section cut into the larger one.

  2. Nick says:

    Here are some more ‘Pixel Fields’ from Florida, just South of Lake Okeechobee: Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth

  3. Andrew says:

    From a zoomed in section on the field link:
    Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth

    This area seems to be obscured but I’m not sure how. Smoke? Someone sneezed on the camera?

  4. Carnildo says:

    The obscured section looks like an area where the person making the map didn’t have a high-resolution photo — if you zoom out, you’ll see it’s a magnified view of the image at zoom level 6.

  5. I don’t think those are all individual fields… I think it’s just because it was a crappy picture or something…

  6. Tim says:

    Has anyone even looked at the midwest? It’s the largest pixelfield ever! Check out the zoom level- and this is only a small section!

    Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth

  7. Gary (DJ Gazmic) says:

    I dont know about pac man, but take a closer look at those fields… Crop Circles?.. no… wierd and sometimes clear images of faces and other noticable things.. i dont know how to link and stuff so, i could have shown you a aliens face.. (well looks like one).

    keep up the good work guys.

    Gary

  8. dub says:

    Another Pacmans in Saudi Arabia : Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
    A blue one eats a little one : Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
    Strange fields : Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth

  9. Jamie says:

    Some more pacman shapes: Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth

  10. Rick says:

    @Dub
    As said in one the earlier posts:
    Theese are not very strange fields, but got their looks from the way they water it. It’s much easier to have a long pipe with a wheel in the end attached to a pole in the middle and have the thing go round and round. Instead of having a long pipe swiping from one end to the other.

    If you zoom all the way you can actually see the boom and the supporting wheels along it:
    Google Maps

    While skipping around on pixel fields in the header post, i came across this. Is it somekind of a huge correction facility? It could look like it due two the two basket courts in the north wing, but I couldn’t tell for sure:

    Google Maps

  11. Rick says:

    1st link again

    Sorry, failed on the first link.

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