If you didn’t already know, Valentine’s Day is imminent, so if you’ve not got that special someone a gift yet you better get on with it!

Perhaps we can help with some Google Earth sights around the globe?

In LA, where just a standard rectangular swimming pool isn’t enough, you need to show love for your other half by building them a heart-shaped swimming pool.

Or take a walk down the aptly-named Cupid Row in San Bruno to these two streets, which together form a perfect heart shape. I wonder if the any of the houses are for sale?

But if you can’t afford a new gaff, how about writing your beloved a simple message of love?

We’re still in California, where a field displays the simple message of “I (heart) U”. Presumably all the local men have at some point claimed responsibility for the declaration¹.

On a German beach near Warnemündethere, there’s a message of love which reads “Andrea möchtest du mich …”. Jenni from Google Sightseeing Deutsch has translated this as “Andrea, would you like to … me”, suggesting that the missing work (obscured by an unhelpful cloud) is “heiraten” (marry). ²

To seal the deal our suitor has even added a large love heart.

Lastly, we visit a packed Brighton seafront for a building promotes Love and Peace in one giant message.

Google Sightseeing wishes you all a happy Valentine’s Day, however you’re spending it! For more romance, we’ve previously visited various other heart-shaped things and heart pools.

Thanks to i-cube, Catherine, PatrickSalsbury, 89shelby, Marc Cohen, Meigel and Alexei.

NASA’s first visitor centre, and one of the world’s largest public collections of space bits is the U.S. Space and Rocket Center near Huntsville, AL.

The main building houses hundreds of space-related artefacts, including bits of real moon rock and the remains of a space monkey, but luckily the best sights are too large to squeeze inside the building and have to be displayed outside¹.

Welcoming you to the centre is an A-12 Blackbird which, as I’m sure you know, isn’t a spacecraft, it’s a plane. But, it’s a very cool plane, so we’ll let them off².

Also noticeable from the entrance is the massive Saturn V, the rocket design that launched NASA’s Apollo and Skylab missions.

However, like the Blackbird, this isn’t a spacecraft; it’s just a full-size mock-up produced especially for the park.

Hoping to actually see some real space things, we come to another Saturn V, this time lying down.

Now this is (sort of) the real deal. Although all three stages come from separate test models not destined for flight, it does have all the inner workings and has thus been awarded the prestigious status of a US national monument.

Alongside Saturn V stands a smaller rocket, Saturn I, which was NASA’s first dedicated “space launcher”.

Again, this particular rocket was never launched, and like the Saturn V is actually a mish-mash of test models. Someone who clearly knows too much about space rockets complains that the booster is even painted incorrectly: “the roll pattern on the fins is also off, as the black-white boundary should be horizontal to the ground an[d] bisecting the root edge of the fins.” Of course we all noticed that glaring error.

Around the other side of the building we find the only “full stack” space shuttle display in the US.

The empty steel model, known as “Pathfinder”, was constructed as an simple weight for testing cranes and other support equipment. It was given the NASA livery in Japan, where it spent some time at the “Great Space Shuttle Exposition” of 1984.

It then returned to America to where we see it now, sitting atop two prototype booster casings which never went into production.

So that was the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, where we can see precisely zero rockets that have ever actually been into space!

Yesterday Google released a major update to Google Earth, adding 3D oceans, a Mars browser and, best of all, historical imagery for much of the globe.

In some places the images go back decades, such as this shot of the Las Vegas strip from July 1950.

When compared with the current view you can see how the strip expanded around the airport, which was in the middle of a barren desert.

Manhattan island also has images for many different years, and going back to April 1994 we can see the World Trade Centre towers.

Although there’s a wealth of new images we’ve never seen before, the update also gives us back lots of great shots that had previously been removed.

Way back in May 2005 we posted a stealth bomber that had been spotted at Edward’s Air Force Base, but later vanished with an image update. Now, by scrolling back to March 15th 2005, the bomber re-appears.

Or, if we keep going back until May 1994 we can see a couple of Blackbirds instead.

We can also revisit one of my favourite sights from the Google Sightseeing archives, the SS American Star.

These days it’s almost completely submerged, but step back through time until 2000 and you’ll see it rise out of the water and right itself.

So, get browsing the archives, and let us know what’s returned!

Last week Google removed some street view photos from upstate New York as they showed the camera car hitting a wild deer as it crossed the road.

The Google Sightseeing team was unfortunately on holiday when the news broke¹, but the images were captured by various other sites before Google took them down.

However, you can still see deer in Japan, where Google drivers have managed to avoid a repeat incident.

Google have now issued a statement, complete with advice on what if a deer bolts in front of your car.

There’s some odd sightings on the ocean floor, thanks to the much-improved ocean surface depth images that were added to Google Earth and Maps last week!

Reader aliosha was browsing the atlantic and discovered a bizarre grid pattern in the deep.

About 150 km square, it presumably isn’t a natural occurrence, but what else could create such a pattern it what must be extremely-deep water?

Even more bizarre, off the coast of Indonesia is what would easily be the largest writing on the planet. At around 130 km wide, it would dwarf second place by a factor of about 30x.

Unfortunately, it is only the largest writing on Google Earth, as this message doesn’t actually exist.

It says “DTS/SIO”, and was added by David T. Sandwell (DTS), a professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO).

The sea bed imagery comes from a variety of bathymetry sources, including the SIO, and Mr Sandwell added the false underwater canyons so that they could see where the SIO’s data was being used.

Thanks to aliosha and GEarth Blog (who also have news of a special event Google are hosting next week in relation to oceans on Google Earth).