Google Sightseeing takes you on tour of the world as seen from satellite, using the free Google Earth program, or Google Maps in your web browser. Each weekday your guides James and Alex present new weird and wonderful sights as suggested by readers.
The parking garage for the Kansas City Public Library may not look very special from above:
… but from street level it’s a different story!
Created several years ago by design firm Dimensional Innovations, the facade of the garage portrays a 9m high ‘community bookshelf’. The titles represented were selected by local residents.
Judging by the number of new followers we have, it appears that this has been the week that Twitter finally hit the mainstream, so we thought we’d post another roundup of the best Street View sights we’ve posted to the Official Google Sightseeing Twitter feed.
Update: It appears several of these have been deleted by Google since we originally posted them, which is just all the more reason to stay abreast of the very latest findings by subscribing to our Twitter feed!
Or, for those of you who want to avoid the direct messaging that accompanies our Street View posts on Twitter, I’ve created an experimental RSS feed with Yahoo pipes that will return all our Twitter posts combined with the posts from the main site. Please bear in mind that although I’ve tried to filter out duplicates and direct message chatter, it’s not perfect. However we will be soon incorporating our two feeds together properly.
Finally, for those that do Twitter, next Thursday I will be attending the Edinburgh Twestival, and James will be representing GSS at the Oxford Twestival! See you there?
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.
Ironically, we were at a wildlife park when this story was published all over the internet. ↩
There are a few contenders for the World’s Largest Cowboy Boots. The best claim perhaps belongs to this pair, which stands 12m tall, outside the North Star Mall in San Antonio, Texas. Tall as they are, they’re barely visible from above, but thankfully the Street View car drove right by.
And they make quite the sight when decorated for Christmas!
A solitary boot of almost the same height can be found in Edmonton, Alberta. Also hard to pick out on the satellite image, Live Maps’ birds eye view is somewhat better.
It’s about 30cm shorter than the pair in San Antonio, but is equally impressive when lit up!
Meanwhile, a 6.5m pair of boots – along with a 13m wide steel cowboy hat – can be found in Oxbow Park in Seattle, Washington … and on Street View and Live Maps.
These structures were relocated from their original gas station location, where the boots contained the bathrooms!
Another location with a larger-than-life cowboy hat is the mini-replica of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Texas, barely visible from the nearest Street View image:
The hat was added in 1998 in an effort to one-up the residents of Paris, Tennessee after several back-and-forth attempts to create the largest replica.
And in Yukon, Oklahoma, a beautifully landscaped boot can be found in Chisholm Trail Park – named for the route of a 19th century cattle drive between Texas and Kansas. The decorative landscaping, including fountains in the two small ponds, is even more visible on Live Maps’ birds eye view.
Thanks to ‘Koty’, Ray, . and Felippo.
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.
The weirdest and best of Google Earth is now available in the…
