There’s something very strange going in Moscow, Russia.

It looks as if a bus has come to a stop right across a motorway, bringing traffic to a complete halt in both directions. There doesn’t appear to be any debris from a crash visible, so what on earth happened here?

Has the bus crashed, or could we actually be witnessing some sort of hostage situation?

Thanks to Jonas Rasmussen.

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

Finally, after years of searching, we’ve found the Loch Ness Monster!

And the reason it has taken so long to find conclusive proof of the monster’s existence is we’ve been looking in entirely the wrong place.

You see, rather than living in the ice-cold waters of Loch Ness, the shrewd dinosaur has opted for a sunny Australian sand-pit, along with her best friends the giant octopus and crocodile.

As Google Earth is getting higher and higher resolution images, there’s much more to see in flight that the odd aeroplane, and today we can see a skydiver in flight over a French drop-zone.

It looks like the skydiver is aiming for the small square landing pad over to the East, where another skydiver with an orange coloured parachute has already landed.

If there was a third diver after the first two, then we could potential see a human-in-flight! I’ve searched the surrounding area, but so far can’t find anything. Have any of our readers had better luck?

While you’re searching: the average skydive only lasts a couple of minutes, so the plane which these people have jumped out of should be around here somewhere…

More on the landing zone (in French) on their website

Thanks: dda

With all the new imagery of Australia, we were really hoping to find a shark – but we had no idea that the first shark discovered would be quite this big!

Creating the shark’s eye with a solitary tree was a particularly brilliant idea we thought!

Thanks to Andrew.