As 2007 draws to a close we present our choices for the best posts of the year.

Best Mystery

There were numerous contenders for the most confusing or bizarre images, but our pick is the Mystery Plane Outline, as even the generally accepted answer, that these are small rocks arranged in the shape of a plane, still begs the question: “But why bother?”.

Best personal project

In February we were impressed with one man’s attempt to single-handedly recreate a cruise ship in his front drive.

Lamest World Record

The Largest Wooden ship in the world from April easily wins this prize, due to having a less-than-exciting title and the fact that the specially built ship has never even been in the water!

A special mention also goes to the German towns squabbling over who has the most unintentionally leaning building.

Our Brains Hurt Award

Getting our heads around the Island and Lake recursion from September’s Island Week 2 was almost too much, but I think we get it now…

Best Smallest Thing

We loved the idea of the world’s smallest parks from January, but the world’s smallest municipal park was just too darn small to see from satellite! Fortunately, Google now have a street view shot of it.

Best World’s Most Enlarged Thing

In the last year we’ve featured many, many sights that claim to be the “World’s largest something” but our pick for the Best Largest something is the World’s largest fingerprint.

Best Imagery

Undoubtedly the most amazing images to be found in Google Earth are the African Megaflyover project aerial shots, and the best of these images were highlighted in November’s Google Sightseeing Safari.

Best Blurry Pictures

Some of the aerial images in Google Earth are amazingly high resolution, but not high enough for our tour of miniature parks across the globe, which ended up as a list of blurry blobs that sort-of look like the Eiffel tower.

Best Landart

The ancient Incan geoglyph of a cat is fantastic, and much more intersting and attractive than kfc’s logo stunt.

Most Ignored Warning

A few days after we posted this year’s April fools joke: “Live Satellite Images in Google Earth” we updated the entry with a banner warning users that it was a prank and there are no live images to be seen. Did anyone read that? Of course not! We still get a new message almost every week from someone who fell for the joke and wants to know where the live images are.

Most In-Depth Post

For a long time it had no decent imagery, so during Island Week this year we really went to town on our Easter Island post, and managed to condense 2,000 years of history into a mere 600 words.

Best Large Type

The rooftop message “Welcome to Cleveland” isn’t very interesting at first glance, until you realise that the message is over 400 miles away in Milwaukee!

So that’s our picks of the year, but with over 250 entries in 2007, what were your favourites?

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2008 - see you all next year!

Today’s the last day of work before our much needed Christmas break, so things will be quiet over the next week as we spend time with our families, eat too much food and celebrate Hogmanay.

So we leave you with our most christmass-y sights of the past.

Merry Christmas to all our readers!

Here we see Germany’s Burgplatz, which is absolutely swarming with people. Or, more specifically, very orange people!

The overwhelming orange-ness of the crowd can only mean they are fans of the Dutch football team, who were gathered in the square during last year’s World cup.

The Netherlands national team was knocked out in the second round by Portugal, so this Dutch celebration probably coincides with their one-nil win over Serbia and Montenegro in the nearby Zentralstadion on June 11th, 2006.

Thanks to McMaster_de

In the past we’ve posted several people’s submissions of what they thought were whales, which might have been captured on the satellite imagery of Google Earth whilst nearing the surface of the open sea.

In most cases however, our ever-attentive readers have presented compelling evidence that these submissions couldn’t actually be whales.

So when Rick Edwards directed us just west of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico to see two separate pods of three whales, you could imagine we would be a little sceptical. However, the apparent visibility of tailfins on the larger ‘whales’ piqued our interest somewhat…

We pressed a little further, checking possible species, sizes, breeding patterns and migratory behaviour, and… well, we wouldn’t have posted it if we didn’t think there was a strong possibility this could be the only definite sighting of whales out at sea¹ on the whole of Google Earth.

As part of the December 07 image update Google have updated their own headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Compared to the older imagery¹ the most obvious difference is that the Googeplex has been absolutely covered in solar panels.

Installed in October 2006, the panels are the world’s largest solar panel installation on a corporate campus in the United States! Er, hang on…

Still, Google should be commended for the project which generates 30% of their peak electricity requirements. Read more on the project’s homepage, which also promises some live stats².

A last minute imagery update of the year has appeared in Google Earth.

By my count the eighth update this year, Google have continued the recent trend of announcing the update with a scavenger hunt. Read the Latlong blog for the full hunt or try the comments on Gearth Blog for more direct instructions.

Get suggesting!

The Searles Lake basin, deep within California’s desert conservation area, is a dry lake bed featuring more than 500 rock spires known as the Trona Pinnacles.

The pinnacles are formed from a rock-like substance known as “tufa”, a calcium carbonate deposit laid down by springs that used to rise up from beneath the lake. The pinnacles are anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 years old and reach up to 42 m above the lake bed.

You’ve probably seen the Trona Pinnacles before without realising it - this otherworldly landscape has been used in numerous sci-fi films including Star Trek V, Planet of the Apes and Lost In Space, and it’s the location for about about 30 new film projects every year!

View ground level images from Lost In Space and the Planet of the Apes remake and there’s more info on Wikipedia.

Thanks to Jeff Alu & Jason Wolfe

The Google latlong blog has just announced that they’ve added street view imagery for 8 more US cities - Boston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Detroit, and Providence.

They’ve also linked to this cool image of the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge in Boston for us - but what new activities can you find on the streets of these cities?

Just remember to send us your finds!

Thanks to Rob for letting us know.