As one of Google Street View cars drove past the Laguna Seca Raceway, it happened to capture a photograph of a race in action.

Aware of its own existence as a fuel-efficient-but-not-exactly-a-racecar Toyota Prius, the anthropomorphized car obviously dreamed of one day being in the Le Mans.

Then all of a sudden, and with some wavy lines down the screen, the dream came true! The Google Street View car was part of the race!

Feeling the wind through its hair as it raced round the track, the car was bolstered by some trackside fans who didn’t spot it as a fraud.

But the dream was on shaky ground, with the car inexplicably being transported back up onto the overbridges as it tried to drive under them.

Eventually though, our plucky camera car took the chequered flag.

Then, awaking from the dream, the street view car went back to the drudgery of capturing pictures of people’s houses.

March 17th is St. Patrick’s Day, which was originally the annual feast of the best known of Ireland’s patron saints¹, and today a worldwide celebration devoted to all things Irish.

Over here in Ireland and the UK, we have been known to celebrate with vast quantities of Guinness. Over in the US however, they like large scale annual celebrations involving crazy things like temporarily dying the Chicago River green (which sadly hasn’t yet been captured on Google Earth²).

But in today’s post we’ll be looking at some of the places that St. Patrick has found a permanent home in the USA.

This is St Patrick’s park in Indiana, where they have created a 400 metre long homage to their namesake, entirely in the medium of trees. Which is apt, given how much of the colour green gets bandied around on the 17th of March.

We’ve visited the original Dublin already on Google Sightseeing, but there are at least nine cities called Dublin in the USA alone!

See for yourself: Dublin, California; Dublin, Georgia; Dublin, Indiana; Dublin, New Hampshire; Dublin, North Carolina; Dublin, Ohio; Dublin, Pennsylvania; Dublin, Texas; and Dublin, Virginia.

In New York City we find St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a spectacular Neo-Gothic cathedral in midtown Manhattan that has become ingrained in Hollywood movie history, after being featured in several movies including 2002’s Spider-Man.

So, where else has St. Patrick and the influence of Ireland made a lasting impression around the world?

Happy Paddy’s day!

Thanks to Chris R.

Today we’ll explore some of the world’s most famous recording studios, starting with Sun Studio in Memphis. I love this Street View with the neon signs glowing!

Perhaps best known as the location of Elvis Presley’s early recordings, the studio was also used by many rock-n-roll greats including Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis. The building reopened in 1987 as a functioning studio and museum, appearing soon after that in the U2 film Rattle and Hum.

Speaking of U2, their first three albums were recorded at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin. While the studio has moved, the location remains a site of pilgrimage for devoted fans who cover the walls with graffiti, visible on Live Maps:

One of the more unique studios in the world is the Astoria studio, found in a houseboat on the River Thames west of London.

Built in 1911, and originally designed to house an entire orchestra, the boat is currently owned by Dave Gilmour and parts of Pink Floyd’s two most recent albums were recorded there.

Most of Prince’s albums from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s were recorded at the now-defunct studio that shared a name with a song and record label: Paisley Park.

While we’ve already visited the Abbey Road zebra crossing on Google Sightseeing, we didn’t look at the actual studio:

Home to the vast majority of The Beatles’ recording sessions, these studios have since hosted a Who’s Who of modern rock, pop and classical music, from Radiohead to the Spice Girls. The wall outside Abbey Road Studios is also covered in graffiti from music fans, though it’s not visible on either Google or Live Maps.

From 1959 to 1971, Motown Records put more than 110 songs into the Top 10 – the majority of them were recorded at Hitsville USA, a pair of Detroit buildings that housed the label’s studios and administrative offices.

The label moved to Los Angeles in 1972, but the buildings have served as a popular museum since 1985.

And finally we fly to Berlin to see the Hansa Tonstudios.

Perhaps most famous for David Bowie’s Low and Heroes albums, many artists have taken residence there seeking inspiration from the culture and history of East and West Berlin.

Where was your favourite album recorded?

Thanks to Lianachan, Stephen Jackson, Martin S., 433 and Stephen LaMora.

Sprawled across the Plains of San Augustin in New Mexico is the Very Large Array – a Y-shaped radio astronomy observatory made up of 27 independent dish antennas.

The scale of the VLA operation is quite remarkable- each dish is 25m across and weighs 209 tonnes. They travel on train tracks which make up each of the three 21km arms of the array. A specially designed locomotive maneuvers the antennas into different configurations for specific observations.

The 27 antennas effectively provide the imaging capability of an antenna 36km wide, with the sensitivity of a dish 130m across. This allows the study of the sun, planets, black holes, pulsars, quasars and myriad other astronomical objects.

Construction was started in 1973 and completed – $78.5million later – in 1980. Currently, new hardware is being installed to improve the capabilites of the observatory – making it the Expanded Very Large Array, and funding is sought to add further dishes across the state to expand the system even further.

The VLA has featured in several movies including Contact, Independence Day and 2010: Odyssey Two.

It was apparently a location of interest for the driver of the Street View Car. Not content to pass by on Highway 60, which crosses the tracks, but without a good view of any dishes …

… a detour was taken down Old Highway 60, past a great view of many dishes, to the point where it reaches the tracks directly beneath one of the dishes.

Google Sightseeing has covered all sorts of telescopes in the past, some of which have received great image updates since they were first posted.

Thanks to the many readers who suggested this one: james v, Stilt, Tim, Matt, Jonathan Hoppe, Benjamin, Benjamin, Doug Hershberger, Jarrod Lombardo, Leandro Garcia, Glenn, Trevor, Derek and Yablo.

This is the first in an occasional series where we’ll be looking at some of the world’s most interesting abandoned places.

In 1908, diamonds were discovered in the Namib Desert, and one of the towns that sprang up to provide shelter and entertainment for the influx of miners was Kolmanskop.

Modelled on a German town, at its height it boasted a hospital, ballroom, power station, school, skittle-alley, theatre and casino and railway line.

10 years later the end of World War I saw a huge drop in diamond prices, which heralded the beginning of the end for Kolmanskop. In 1936 larger deposits of more valuable diamonds were found near the coast, and the miners began to leave for the newly founded town of Oranjemund.

By the 1950s Kolmanskop was completely deserted, and the sweeping desert sand began to reclaim the town, wearing down the buildings and filling them slowly with sand.

More recently, Kolmanskop has been featured in movies, and today it’s a popular tourist destination run by the De Beers diamond company. It has been extensively documented by the photographers of Flickr, and has even inspired whole albums.

There’s more about Kolmanskop and Oranjemund on Wikipedia.

Thanks to Phillip Lockwood-Holmes.