With high-resolution images all over the globe, Google Earth has captured many sporting events actually in-progress, so today we proudly present – The Top 10 different sports you can actually see people playing on Google Earth!

As a bonus, we’ve tried to work out how each game is going, and to make things even more difficult for ourselves, we’ve limited our search to ballgames only.

10. First let’s look at the 2nd of the 18-hole Las Vegas Country Club Golf Course, where we see the pin lying on the grass and the person closest playing their putt. Everyone else is standing around, probably telling him to hurry up.

9. As the world’s most popular sport, there must be hundreds of games of football being played at any one second. Here we see students playing “the beautiful game” at the University of Tokyo. However, this looks like it’s just a practise session as there’s no goalie at either end.

8. There’s people playing tennis all over the globe but for the top 10 we’ve chosen these two games of doubles being played on clay in Germany.

The eastern game is in full swing, and on the western court the players are standing in their service positions, and judging from the shadows it looks as if the southern team are about to serve!

7. There’s a good turnout for Lawn Bowls at Bell Vue Park Bowling Green in Newport, Wales. Sadly the bowls are just too small to be seen so we can’t tell how the games are going.

6. The stands are filling up at Yankee stadium, and there’s a couple of people on the field, but we’re a little too early for the game.

Hmm, we’ll need another baseball game in progress… here’s four!

In the thumbnail we see a batter up at the plate, and I think the bases are loaded.

5. The Shay in Halifax, England is also used for football games, but today it’s a home game for local rugby league team Halifax RLFC.

The ball is probably somewhere in the west of the pitch and the team to the north are on the offensive.

4. They’re playing lacrosse in Salamanca, New York. You can tell that it’s a men’s game as there are 20 players on the pitch (women’s lacrosse would have 24 players).

3. Here is a cricket match being played in the village of Hoylandswaine, north of Sheffield. It looks like they’re between plays, as the batsman has stepped back from the wicket to the west and we can see the other batsman and the bowler at the eastern end.

2. Here we see a packed gameday at Seahawks Stadium (now Qwest field) with 63,588 people watching the Nevada Wolf Pack at Washington State Cougars on August 31, 2002.

Google Earth Community member GEChump managed to identify the exact play seen in the photo, making this 11:37 remaining in the second quarter with the game tied at 7.

The Cougars eventually went on to win 31-7.

1. Finally, we find a tense one-on-one street-Basketball game being played in Rolde, Netherlands. Due to the left-hand player’s poor defence the right-hand player has just taken a shot at the basket, however they’ve missed and the ball is rebounding back.

Have you found a ball game on Google Earth not mentioned here? Let us know!

Thanks: heamit, mike, Kegan, seamus, Jeff, John Culbert, Jeni, Kristen, Mark, shuvman, vancantona, silkobilko, Crebbin, patmonahan, Majoska, pttech, Adam Rus, Ian, Arlene and the Google Earth Community.

Parking in the Hague has got so difficult that some people are having to take extreme measures – parking on the side of buildings!

This is actually the work of artist Theo van Laar, who has continued the car park markings up the wall and attached a gravity-defying Mini. At night time the car’s headlights even light up! You can see the work from the ground during the day or at night.

Thanks: caelestis & Google Earth Blog

Yes people, this pair of spermatozoon spermatozoa are each nearly half a mile long! At least, I think they’re sperm cells hugely magnified – it’s that or some sort of crazy elongated guitar art?

Thanks to James Bonnette

Here in Chile’s Atacama Desert, there are many examples of ancient Incan geoglyphs, similar to the Nazca Lines in neighbouring Peru, but spread over a much wider area.

In the northern desert the Chiza geoglyphs were made by carefully arranging the dark stones on the light sand to create figures of humans, birds and animals. In contrast to the Nazca lines, of of these geoglyphs are on hillsides, and can therefore be seen from ground level – in fact a car has stopped by the road here to admire these ones.

Further south, we find the geoglyphs at Tiliviche – which is a huge drawing of a whole herd of Llamas being rounded up by a fat guy and a skinny guy (Llamas were used by the Incas as a system of transportation).

Moving further south again, we find the Pintados geoglyphs. Although these figures of men, beasts, birds and geometric shapes are comparitively small, there are around 400 individual geoglyphs here! Interestingly it seems that these were all made by clearing the dark rocks to create the image.

Finally, the most impressive geoglyph in Chile has got to be the totally brilliant Atacama Giant, which at 80 metres, claims to be the world’s largest prehistorical anthropomorphic figure (of course, if you’re a regular reader you’ll know to consider these “world’s largest” claims carefully…)

There’s other shapes and figures here too, but personally I think this “gigantic cat-looking-thing” is one of the best geoglyphs anywhere

Here’s some more info on the Atacama Giant, the Inca Empire, and um, Llamas.

Thanks to Mauricio Aguilar, Yannick Lemieux, Patrick and Juan Arancibia.

There’s an odd fish-shaped clearing in the forest just outside the Dutch city of Ommen.

However, even using my best Google searching abilities, I can’t find any information on whether or not the clearing is a natural phenomena or a man-made advert for a great fishing spot.

If it is a fishing spot then we could say there’s both fish in the pond and pond in the fish

Thanks: koen L