National Geographic African Megaflyover Project

Thursday, 8th March 2007 by

News has spread across the internet over the last day or two of a "hack" that allows you much more zooming on Google Maps.

Unfortunately for all the people who've wasted hours scanning the earth, this is really nothing new. There are no methods for seeing higher resolution images of your favourite area than you can see today in Google Maps and Google Earth.

The confusion has developed from the recent Australia flyover and the far-from recent Africa flyover project. The result of both projects was images of a much higher resolution than elsewhere in the world - meaning there's an extra zoom level or two in these areas and these areas only1.

A lot of folk have been suggesting that we feature these "new" sights, and even though we've highlighted a few before I thought I'd have another look...

The 500 different Megaflyover photographs included in Google Maps and Earth were selected by Mike Fay from his library of almost 92,000 images, taken from a small plane flying at low altitude.

A couple of my favourite images are these guys in a small village, looking up at the aircraft as it passes over...

I also liked this pack of camels, roaming the desert.

But there's hundreds more. So please, take my advice: Stop trying to hack URLs, load up Google Earth and switch on the "National Geographic Magazine Layer" under Featured Content. You'll find it much more rewarding.


Previous Megaflyover shots on Google Sightseeing: Victoria Falls, The Longest Conveyor Belt in the World and N’dama Skull and Australia Day shots: Australia Day (check the comments too), NRMA Motorfest ‘07 & Nessie.

Wikipedia Links: Mike Fay and his MegaFlyover


  1. It wouldn't make sense to add these extra zoom levels to the other 99.9% of the globe, there would be a whole lot more confusion! ↩︎