At the Memphis-Days Inn At Graceland there’s a big blue guitar (yes, of course it’s a pool – here’s ground-level shots).

And all the way over in Tamworth, New South Wales, Australia, there’s the Big Golden Guitar, which is exactly that – a big gold guitar. There’s a ground-level picture on the official site of the Big Golden Guitar Tourist Centre, which is the location for Australia’s Tamworth Country Music Festival.

You can see previously-featured guitars here at Google Sightseeing, and I recently read about a huge piano-shaped pool in Florida… Can anyone find it?

Thanks to Mary and our resident Australian expert, woowoowoo.

It’s two stadiums in one! While looking at the most recent Imagery update for Google Earth on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, I was trying to match up the older Google Maps images with the newer Google Earth images.

I thought that a large landmark such as the Aloha Stadium in Honolulu would make lining up the images easy, but I was very confused that there’s two completely different stadiums on the same spot – on Google Maps image is of an American Football stadium, whereas the new Google Earth Imagery shows a Baseball diamond.

The stadium has four movable sections, each 3.5 million pounds, which rotate to form two entirely different stadiums. Not for long though as in 2007 the transformer stadium will be permanently locked into American Football mode. More information on Wikipedia.

There’s been another image update to Google Earth, as announced by PenguinOpus on the Google Earth forums. The updated areas are:

• 12 high-resolution cities in Germany (Bayreuth, Bochum, Castrop-Rauxel, Fulda, Hof, Mannheim, Marburg, Potsdam, Schweinfurt, Siegen, Unna Froendenberg, Wuerzburg)
• 6 high-resolution regions in the UK (Bridgend, Cleveland, Dundee, Plymouth, Poole, Rochford)
• 31 city updates from Digital Globe
• entire island of Oahu
• Imagery from individual cities/counties: Grants Pass, OR; City of Kent, WA; Salem, OR; Douglas County, WA; Hartford County, MD; Jackson County, OR; Summit County, OR;
• Expanded/updated coverage for the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Indiana, and Florida
• Darfur
• 66 Islands
• improved SF/Bay area water

Unfortunately, the imagery update has not yet made its way into Google Maps, but I’m sure it won’t be too long until the two are in sync again.

The KT Palmer Sundial is the largest in North America, described well at The Big Waste of Space. As sundials were primarily designed for telling the time it should be easy to find out when this satellite photograph was taken.

By my measurements the shadow of the sundial is at 337 degrees or 11 hours 14 minutes¹. To translate this to the local time we must adjust for the sundial’s location on the Earth by following the instructions in this article.

Arizona is Mountain Standard Time (MST), which is GMT – 7 so the centre longitude is 105 degrees West. The sundial is 111.9 degrees West, and we need to adjust by 4 minutes for every degree off centre. That means our sundial is 27 minutes and 36 seconds behind local clocks and watches.

Next, we have to adjust for the “Equation of Time”, which means we need to know the exact day this photo was taken. As it’s a Digital Globe picture, we can find it in the archive where they date the photo to March 12 2005. Looking up this table we need to subtract 9m and 42s².

Sticking it all together I therefore conclude that this satellite picture was taken at 10:36:42 MST on March 12th 2005!

There’s a 145ft tall giant man taking a nap just to the North of Milwaukee Mile NASCAR track.

I wonder if any of the carnival-goers have noticed?

Thanks: Mike Pegg