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!

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.

There have been many creatures found on Google Earth, but the most impressive ones are mostly there as part of the National Geographic African Megaflyover Project, which brought us thousands of super-high-resolution aerial photographs of Africa. So to highlight the best, today we’re going on Google Sightseeing Safari!

Let’s start with the basics: many of the animals we can see in Africa are of course working animals, like this large flock of sheep, these forlorn looking donkeys, and an absolute plethora of cows, goats, camels, and people filling up at a well.

We can do much better than this though – out in the wild, things start to get a lot more exciting.

Firstly we can see a small group of Gazelles caught mid-leap in the desert of Chad, and there’s obviously been a few passing this way – look how many hoof-prints they’ve left in the sand! Also caught leaping (but through a river), are a large group of Red Lechewe in Zambia.

Again in Chad, but out on the savannah this time, we find this wonderful image of a small family of Elephants huddling together to protect their young. Presumably from the terrifying machine flying overhead…

Out on the plain in Mozambique we can see a portion of what must have been a fairly enormous herd of Buffalo, again presumably fleeing from the plane above them.

Thanks to the exceptional resolution of these images, the animals don’t have to be as big as the 1.7 metre high African Buffalo to be spotted. In a swamp in Mali, there’s a great image of a Giant Stork flapping lazily around. Just to the south there’s actually one perched in a mangrove, and lots of other birds have been caught on the wing elsewhere in Mali.

Not all the birds found are own their own though – on the coast of Mozambique there’s a stunning image of a huge flock of Pink Flamingos taking off (perhaps they were startled by this small boat to the north?).

To Zambia now, where we can see some lovely chubby little baby hippos and even better, in Tanzania we can see a pod of hundreds of hippos wallowing in the mud, which is a truly incredible sight.

Here’s another shot of the same hippos in the mud¹, but this time we can more clearly see that’s there’s actually a dead hippo lying on the bank, being feasted on by vultures.

Hippos tend to share their pools and rivers with other creatures – particularly crocodiles, and nearby to yet another pod of hippos we can see the unmistakable silhouette of a crocodile just under the water. Next to the first hippos we found, there’s another crocodile, just chilling out on the bank.

Finally, although not being the kind of animals you’d traditionally expect to see while on safari, these images of seals on the coast of Namibia are too good not to include!

And here ends the great Google Sightseeing Safari. Of course this is only the beginning as there are more than 500 Megaflyover images to explore in Google Earth! Reggie98 at the Keyhole foums has been categorizing all of the animals to be found in them.

To see all the Megaflyover images, open “Gallery” in the Layers sub-panel (bottom-left) and enable the National Geographic Layer. You’ll see little red aircraft symbols appearing all over Africa, and each of these will take you to a hi-res shot of the area. Also, here’s a link to download a kml file which details many of the hundreds of undocumented images that form part of this enormous and stunning collection.

Thanks to all of the people at the Keyhole forums who helped me find these fascinating images! For more background on the project, visit the official Megaflyover and National Geographic pages.

If you happened to own an airfield, and you just happened to have some spare runways lying around – what would you do with them?

RAF Thurleigh was built during WWII and after the war became a development site known as RAE Bedford, until it was eventually decommissioned in 1994. Since then the airfield has been split into two sections; the Northern half is used for the Bedford Autodrome race track, and the runways are used as mass car-storage.

Last weekend I took a microlight flight over RAE Bedford for a closer look. I didn’t actually fly the microlight (the pilot was doing that), I just sat in the back and bored the pilot with “Oooh, it’s like a live version of Google Earth!” every couple of minutes.

Anyway, this extra insight enables me to tell you that most of the vehicles looked brand-spanking new, sometimes with 20 or so of the same model lined up next to each other.

Wombleton airfield was also built for WWII – operating as a Canadian Air Force “conversion unit”, where pilots who were used to flying small 2 engine planes were trained to fly 4 engines instead. Unlike the Bedford facility however, somebody decided that one of the main runways should instead be used for pig farming.

Unless this is a top-secret facility involved in the genetic engineering of pigs that fly?

Thanks to d5skipper, Oliver Laumann & others and Trina

I’m going with Whale. No wait, rock! What do you think?

See our previous whale posts for more dubious whale sightings!

Thanks: Joshk.