In April this year, Mount Merapi began erupting for the first time since 2002. Indonesia’s most active volcano, it has erupted 68 times since 1548 – thoroughly earning its name, which means “Mountain of Fire”.

Just over a week ago 2 people were sadly killed by the volcano, and tragically some 5,000 people were killed and 200,000 were left homeless by an earthquake which struck to the south west on the 27th of May.

And unfortunately it seems that Merapi isn’t finished yet.

Thanks to Mathieu Villeneuve.

Google Earth Blog reports that Google Earth has had a huge imagery update with satellite and aerial pics across the globe.

The images haven’t made their way into Maps yet, so if you click the image below you’ll just get an out-of-focus empty shore, but click the Google Earth link and you’ll fly to one of the super-cool artificial Palm Islands in Dubai.

There’s loads of things to see all over the place so hopefully we’ll see the images in Google Maps soon!

Today we’re looking at E-3 Sentry AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) planes – they’re really just Boeing 707s with a 9.1m diameter rotating radar strapped onto the back, which provides airborne surveillance and battle management.

Starting in Britain there’s an E-3 Sentry at RAF Mildenhall. This is one of seven that the RAF purchased and named Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey, Bashful and Doc.

Hopping over to France we see 3 of 4 E-3s owned by the Armée de l’Air.

Further afield there’s Khorat airfield in Thailand. I think this is actually a US E-3 and part of “Cope Tiger”, an annual, multinational exercise for practising interoperability with U.S. Forces. There’s also various fighter planes to see just to the South.

The US Air Force owns 34 E-3s in total and 28 of them are stationed at Tinker AFB (although I only count 13). Tinker AFB’s claim to fame is that in 1948 the first ever Tornado warning was issused from here (about 3 hours before it hit).

Also worth seeing while we’re in the area is another Children’s Play Area and [B-52 and B-1B bombers](http://googlesightseeing.com/maps?p=951&c=&t=k&hl=en&ll=35.411464,-97.378006&z=17 ) which, according to submitter “West,” are being refitted with new electronics to allow them to carry and drop JDAM munitions.

Thanks: Don Mecoy, Mike, DFarmer, DDA, Grant hutchins, West, pooms, CraX & teuf

Invasion of the fat planes! There’s a really fat green plane at Heathrow (which looks a little like Thunderbird 2)…

And at Hong Kong International, there’s some sort of fat pink alien spacecraft!

(Or these might be fire training aircraft of course…)

Update: from the comments, here’s a lime-green fatplane, and a white one which has some mysterious Dutch writing next to it…

Thanks to Mako, foo and Marco.

Taking its name from the nearby city of Dohuk, also spelled Dahuk, Dohuk Dam supplies the city with drinking water and has a 45m wide Kurdistan flag painted onto the Dam. Top to bottom the flag is red, white and green with a yellow sun in the middle.

Dohuk is located in Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous political entity located in Northern Iraq, although Kurdish nationalists call this “South Kurdistan” with “North Kurdistan” being in, uh, Southeast Turkey. I’m confused.

So, despite being technically in Iraq, the people here proudly fly the flag of Kurdistan and painted it on their dam – unlike the Kurdish regions of neighbouring countries Iran, Syria, and Turkey – where flying the flag is a criminal offence.

Thanks: Rawand Nawroly & J. L. Precup