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.
Brilliant bit of weirdness here… Tom Comeau says:
I believe it’s winter, and we’re seeing snow and ice on the lake surface. But where there’s clear water, something very odd is showing through.
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The weirdest and best of Google Earth is now available in the…
its ice … duh, the cameras that they use to take these pics have trouble with ice. that is the result. sorry all you x-files fans.
Kansas….. perhaps Smallville. Fortress of solitude. Clark built it on his backyard.
SCREENSHOT THE PICTURE AND THROW IT IN PAINT. GO TO IMAGE > INVERT COLORS. THE LAKE BECOMES BLUE THE CRAZY COLORS BECOME OBVIOUS ICE AND THATS THE END OF THAT.
No it doesnt. it goes white green and orange.
Here’s an example of another icy lake in New Hampshire:
Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
It looks somewhat normal, except for the lines. So whatever took this picture can take ice.
The New Hampshire lines look like ATV or Snowmobile tracks.
I have secretly spent hours sifting trhough this data and it actually the goverenment hiding something in the lake with a mineral that causes the lens to recieve wrong data and look like well that to see the ACTUALL image of whats really in the lake after hours of descrambling go to my website http://www.seeley.tk and click on photos the end result is amazing. go see for your self.
No. Actually its the anomalous satellite equivalent of:
http://scientificsonline.com/product.asp?pn=3033538&sid=froogle&bhcd2=1118512659
I think it’s just the camera reflecting back off the ice. We’re seeing back into the Sat.
the ice is reflecting, and we are seeing the wall that stop the universe!!!
You people are a hoot!
Here is what the smoother parts of the lake looked like after the contrast was pushed all the way to the upper limit, but before the circuit board or whatever image was inserted:
Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
Zoom out a bit and you will see this patch of unmanipulated lake surface is a few hundred yards from some of the best of the “grid.” I swear, if someone finds and posts a link to the image used in this little joke, there will be a few posters claiming that it just happens to look like the “inside of the satellite!” (These images were, of course, taken with a camera mounted in a small airplane.)
From a small plane? Do you even have any idea how this system works or what it is? Whatever the camera trick was seems to follow the lower points in the lake where the pattern is the most obvious, pointing more towards the light reflection theory behind it. ANother thing is, why are there so many “roads” or whatever around it? Nevermind, must be like a farming comutnity or something. I dont think it’s manipulated at all except by the technology that took it and mother nature. Or, whatever IS down there, for all you alien heads. lol.
*Do you even have any idea how this system works or what it is?*
You could look it up. Probably should have.
The “high res” images, or usually what you get at the three or four highest “clicks” on the zoom scale, were taken from about 17,500 feet by several aerial photography contractors. Most use the Zeiss rmk top15 camera, which is a film camera.
google Zeiss rmk top 15 for some interesting reading.
the strange thing is why the grass changes color! :-S
My bad, didnt know that, just misinformed. At any rate, go over to the “town” or whatever to the left, zoom in as far as you can go, everything looks “smudged”. Even without the smudging, still looks like a podunk place.
Ummm…Kansas city is in both Kansas and Missouri. It’s on the border. Sort of like Lake Tahoe, CA, and Lake Tahoe NV.
How the person who apparently lives on the Missouri side doesn’t realize this…i’ll never know.
what I thought was odd was that the area that was tampered with is a “Waterfowl Refuge” with “special regulations”.. so maybe this really is the work of the government or aliens? Personally, I think it’s just ice and bad image processing, but it’s food for thought for all you out there that might think otherwise.
well look at the links i posted before!!! its just a regular lake for fishing, sailing, hunting etc!
I think some geeks are over the edge. Just relax. We would like more of this type. Please!!
Looks Like A City with pictures taken at night time?
There Are “Roads” in that lake:)
I’ve been there; it’s one of the many entrances to HELL!
Yeah, and if you put in “Amarillo, Texas”, you see these weird things that look like crop circles.
And?
Looks sort of like a color-conversion algorithm is choking on out-of-gamut colors and turning a bunch of simple compression artifacts into garish purple rectangles.
That’d be my guess, or something like it…
Those are in fact crop circles. Circles of crops. The result of using “center pivot” irrigation systems.
I was just at Smithville Lake yesterday to set up my camp for an SCA (medieval recreation group) event. I will be back out there tomorrow and stay there for the rest of the week. Luckily my camp is in the normal area and not in the area that has been assimilated by the Borg.
One guy made some sense, and that was the lake was exactly the right colour, and was assigned a transparency (you can see from the fades between data google have some alpha channel on top of the data, so an indexed transparency colour doesn’t seem feasible).
So why do I support this? Well, if it is automatic, and I don’t think a google employee would be that bored (is that ‘I love you susan’ real, or a lazy employee in the chain of events?
think about it), then the only way you could classify the lake area with a simple homogeneity criterion (being the same) is the colour.
If you have ever used a memory explorer card on the amiga (action replay?) or just used windows for long enough, sometimes the video memory gets jizzed onto your screen (or on pixel line while playing a game) and you see something very similar to this.
The lines do look like a city which was conveniently N/S E/W (I guess lots are) but it looks like the image was reindexed (colour wise) where black becomes pink, pink becomes orange, orange shade 1 becomes vermillion, orane shade 2 becomes puce - i.e. random). When dealin with lots of data sources, indexing the colours may have cut down on the peta bytes.
Now to debunk some of the above whackos
“I believe we are seeing crystaline domains in clear ice. ”
Yeah… ok I will just take this as a joke.
“Because the atoms in crystals align themselves in very ordered ways, that’s why. Ever look at a crystal? It’s got all these geometric shapes.”
Getting less easy to call this a joke…
“Actually it looks like what a natural macro-textures look like after raster convolution matrix processing.”
No it doesn’t a convolution matrix wouldn’t add lines that are not there. It would highlight them (111,000,-1-1-1 or some flavour of the above) or deminish them, or even emboss the lake. Plus I doubt someone did that.
“Looks sort of like a color-conversion algorithm is choking on out-of-gamut colors and turning a bunch of simple compression artifacts into garish purple rectangles.”
Gamut isn’t a consideration inside a computer, but int he output devices, because we have a binary gamut of (to name a few) 8,16 and 24 bit color spaces. Now they can be represented in RGB, CMYK, LABa, XYZ or HSB which do all have their own profiles, but the gamut is more important for devices (as in what is the range of colours it can show, and for any particular value, what colour will be shown?) which is why you can download an offset printers gamut into your machine, and your PS now acts like an offset printer. Diff computers have diff gamma / gamut standards (and monitors) so web safe colours we introduced, but even monitor to monitor th colours look different.
Did anyone email google maps? I am sure they would know.
“Gamut isn’t a consideration inside a computer, but int he output devices, because we have a binary gamut of (to name a few) 8,16 and 24 bit color spaces.”
Yes, but in image compression, you often use some color space like YUV, LABa, or something similar as an intermediate stage in the processing, because brightness and hue/saturation information can be compressed to different degrees. Conversion from that to RGB will involve a color transformation, and the two color spaces have different extreme ranges of colors they can handle in a finite number of bits, which is what I meant by gamut. And if there’s something wrong with the bounds checking in the software, it’s often the extreme colors at the edges of the available color space that end up with trouble. (I’ve debugged problems like this before.)
This could also be, as somebody else suggested, simply the effect of some sort of wildly exaggerated contrast enhancement working on compression artifacts. The rectangles/grids sure do look like some kind of compression artifacts to me, though they’re not JPEG artifacts.
There is no city there, it a damn lake, get over it
The only real question here is whether that wrecked rectangle of image is the product of deliberate tampering (my bet) or some cascading comedy of errors that somehow went unnoticed. Either scenario is ineresting, especially to us geeks.
From what I have been able to learn about the process of making this amazing resource available, there is a lot of hand work involved at many levels. I have a hard time imagining it to be a system that could produce such a glaring anomaly in the first place, let alone one that would allow it to reach our screens. But I’m just one geek. What do I know?
Well, I do know that’s an ordinary lake. Duh.
its obviously aliens, god, are you guys all blind!? or retarded?
The Borg have assimilated Tron into the Matrix. But that’s not the worst of it; Microsoft is about to swallow the whole shebang.
Okay, so, reading through all the comments, I’ll take another crack at it.
The picture is taken from an airplane, in the winter. Snow is on the ground, so it is very difficult to take good pictures, because everything is either very dark or very very white. (Anyone who has done winter camping in a dim cabin knows well the insane contrast between the dark indoors and the snow outside — you go blind.
Also, I think solar radiation is more intense during the winter because of the intense reflection of snow. An airplane spending some time with overly sensitive film at high altitude is going to have some weird radiative and em things going on that will impact the film, and because they are trying to get some useful aerial pictures of a bright bright bright landscape during the winter, they may be using weird film to begin with.
So, the film gets a little freaked out because its some special film being run through some fancy fancy electronics gadgetry in an airplane that’s high in the atmosphere being bombarded with extra radiation. Hell, maybe it gets cold in the equipment or while being handled on the ground, and anyway, te stuff gets warped.
Eventually its fed to one electronic system, then another, compressed, decompressed … there’s already some warped artifacting from the film and the couple times it gets reprocessed on its way into Google and back out to your web browser, we get enough time for some bizarre-o artifacting.
I sincerely doubt anyone REALLY believes there’s aliens there, or if they do, they are sufficiently paranoid enough not to track their paranoia to anywhere the government is watching, its just that geeks have a fun sense of humor that has been warped by having watched a few too many wack X-Files episodes.
Thanks,
-danny
totally. still fun to mess with though.
Wow, with a system that susceptible to error, it’s a wonder there aren’t bizarre things turning up all over!
How does film get “freaked out,” exactly? Do you mean overexposed? Are you assuming that no one checks this stuff before it’s made available to us civilians? Even at this zoom level:
Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth
it’s obvious there is something very wrong with that image. Black Ice, maybe? And why is the contrast so out of whack on just this one rectangle? Can anyone point me to another image with similar contrast problems? (Never mind the other stuff!) It renders this one practically useless. This image is adjacent to a patch that does not zoom past the satellite image, so why not use that level in place of the obvious damage? I really don’t think this is a situation where “it’s all done with computers and robots.”
its smirnoff black ice!