As the summer wedding season gets into full swing, even Google is muscling in on the action, and has managed to capture a rather charming shot of the newlyweds - probably much to the disappointment of the photographer who wanted the exclusive!

In my opinion, a spectacular photo opportunity, as this is Columbus Circle in New York City, a famous landmark which is surrounded by amazing skyscrapers - not least the Trump International Hotel and Tower behind the party.

Along with the 44 story luxury hotel, Columbus Circle features the New York home of CNN as well as The Time Warner Centre, two striking glass towers which each top out at 229m. This is also home to a record-breakingly expensive penthouse that was sold in 2003 for $54.7 million.

Thanks to the new imagery which allows for nearly 360 degree views, you can see all of New York’s skyscrapers instead of the first 5 floors of them, so get hunting and tell us!

Find out more about the history of Columbus Circle at Wikipedia, as well as more on The Time Warner Centre and Trump International Hotel and Tower.

Thanks: streetviewfun

A recent update to the Street View images of Manhattan has added a new feature designed to protect the privacy of innocent people wandering the streets. So what is this incredible new technology? Why, it’s automatic blurry faces of course!

The new system is designed to detect faces in the street view images and blur them out, so everyone looks like they’ve been watching The Ring.

Due to the vast amount of data involved here, the system is fully automatic - which fortunately for us, appears to be prone to making mistakes! For example, it’s not just real faces that get blurred - this roadside advert featuring the face of the Dali lama has also been obscured to protect his privacy rights (although if you move up the street and look back and you’ll be able to make out his face).

It seems that the system really is very good though. Too good perhaps, as demonstrated by this completely anonymous horse in central park.

One of the reasons that Google has implemented this technology now is possibly that the privacy laws in Canada, Australia and much of Europe would not have allowed images like these to be published otherwise, so it appears that Street View will definitely be coming to a city near you soon.

In the meantime, can anyone find any other examples of incorrectly blurred faces? Or perhaps you can recognise someone despite the blurring? Let us know in the comments!

A star fort or trace italienne is a type of military fortification first introduced in Italy around the mid-fifteenth century. Traditional medieval castles, towers and ring forts had proved extremely vulnerable to increasingly mobile cannons, and star forts were introduced specifically to better defend against them.

The tiny Italian town of Palmanova was founded in 1593, and using all the military innovations of the 16th century was built in the shape of nine-pointed star. You can still see quite clearly how the shape of the ramparts allows the points of the star to defend each other. Originally a moat surrounded the town (which partially remains today), and three heavily guarded gates (1, 2, 3) were the only way in.

Palmanova, Italy (Wikipedia)

Cannons were most effective when they were fired perpendicular to the walls of the building under attack, and the star shaped design meant that to best position their weapons, attacking forces would have enter the space between the points of the star - where they would be fired on from both sides!

The judicious use of moats could further thwart the attacking forces, as demonstrated superbly here at Naarden, Netherlands.

Naarden, Netherlands (Wikipedia)

By the late seventeenth-century star forts reached the pinnacle of their development, as shown by this complicated example in Bourtange, Netherlands, which has been fully restored to how it would have been in 1742. Here we can see that the design provides defence in depth, with tiers of ramparts that an attacker would have had to overcome to be in with a chance of taking the fort.

Bourtange, Netherlands (Wikipedia)

This ingenious design quickly became the gold standard for defensive forts, and went on to spread across Europe and the Americas:

Fort Manoel, Malta (Wikipedia)

Fort McHenry, Maryland (Wikipedia)

Fort Jay (Wikipedia) and Fort Ticonderoga (Wikipedia), New York

Castillo de San Marcos, Florida (Wikipedia)

The design even reached South Africa, where today the Castle of Good Hope can be seen right in the middle of the city! It used to be on the coast, but land reclamation allowed the city to expand around it.

Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town, South Africa (Wikipedia)

In the nineteenth century the development of the exploding shell changed the nature of defensive fortifications forever, and the star fort soon became utterly obsolete. Which is why several are today used for completely different purposes - like this example in Slovakia where they now spend their time trying to keep people inside rather than out.

Leopoldov Prison, Slovakia (Wikipedia)

And finally, what is probably the world’s most famous star fort isn’t actually known for being a star fort at all - as Fort Wood is today the distinctive star-shaped pedestal underneath New York’s Statue of Liberty.

Fort Wood, New York (Wikipedia)

We’ve previously featured just one star fort several star forts, including Kastellet in Copenhagen, Citadel Hill in Canada, and the aforementioned Fort McHenry in Maryland. If that’s not enough, there’s a whole page about them at Wikipedia too.

Thanks to Dan W, Manuel Hewitt, RB, tom schuring, Stefano Bertolo and Federico Cretti.

Ira Rennert is the billionaire founder of Renco Group¹, who is best known for the palatial property he had built in the Hamptons, New York. It is the largest privately owned house in America It is purportedly the largest privately owned and occupied house in America, and is estimated to be the world’s most expensive home.

The beach-front complex is known as Fairfield, and it nestles in a mere 255,000 m² of land (63 acres). The buildings themselves have over 10,000 m² of floor-space, and contain 29 bedrooms, 39 bathrooms, a 28 m long dining room, a bowling alley, a squash court and by all accounts a $150,000 hot tub!

Outside we can see the obligatory tennis and basketball courts, a modest-sized swimming pool and this ground level picture proves that money can’t necessarily buy good taste…

In 2007 Mr Rennert reportedly paid a staggering $397,559 in tax on this property, and based on these figures, the building has been estimated to be worth at least $170 million.

Read more about Mr. Rennert and his house at Wikipedia. Thanks to Bob and mesmart.

Following on from January’s World’s biggest passenger ships post, today we’re going to be looking at the largest aircraft carriers on the water. These warships act as mobile airbases, allowing aircraft to be launched as close to the theatre of war as possible.

Starting with the largest, the undisputed Queen of the seas is the USS Enterprise, which takes the title of being the largest naval vessel on Earth (or water!), with a massive length of 342.3 metres.

Enterprise is moored up alongside the almost-as-large USS Harry Truman and Roosevelt. Like the other seven of the Nimitz class carriers, these are 333m long. Roosevelt, nicknamed ‘Rough Rider’, was responsible for nearly 5000 tonnes of bombs dropped during the first Gulf War.

The Naval Station at Norfolk, Virginia, where these three ships reside when not on active duty, is actually the largest naval base in the World, with 75 ships calling it home - as well as having, incidentally, a huge amount of car-parking spaces!

The USS George HW Bush is the last in Nimitz class, before the new Ford class carriers start being built, and is named for former President Bush. Costing a whopping $4.5 billion, this 333m carrier is on track to be delivered this year. She is seen here in construction at the Northrop Grumman shipyard, also in Norfolk.

(You can see a Microsoft Live Maps birds eye view of it in construction here, but sadly it still isn’t compatible with Safari!)

Back in 1957, the largest naval vessel ever built was the Forrestal Class USS Ranger, which measures 319m and is capable of carrying up to 90 aircraft aboard.

Ranger is seen here with Forrestal class USS Independence and the Kitty Hawk class USS Constellation, which have all been decommissioned to the Naval Air Station in Bremerton, WA.

Now taking the role of the Sea, Air and Space museum in New York City, the USS Intrepid saw service from World War 2 right through to 1974, including in the Vietnam war, where planes would often be launched from her in intervals as small as every 26 seconds!

In late 2006 Intrepid was dragged out of the Hudson river’s mud (with considerable effort) and transferred to Staten Island for repair work. She is expected to be back on display in September.

The most noticeable of Intrepid’s aircraft is the Lockheed A-12, the precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird which is famed for flying from New York to London in 1 hour 54 minutes! You might recognise the plane from ‘I am Legend’, where Will Smith’s character spends time hitting golf balls from her wing.

She may be just a wee tiddler at 214m (this photo shows a comparison between a Nimitz class ship and the HMS Illustrious), but it would be wrong to not include at least one British vessel! HMS Invincible was decommissioned in 2005, and is seen here at Portsmouth Harbour. She’s definitely going nowhere - you can see her propellers lying on the deck!

She was superseded by HMS Illustrious - found in dry-dock in Rosyth having a refit, which was completed last year. In 2014, the first of the new Queen Elizabeth class carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth is due to enter service, at a much more substantial 274m in length. HMS Prince of Wales will join her in 2016.

Previosuly on Google Sightseeing: Carrier Landing Practice Runway and Landlocked.

Thanks: Andrew, Kevin, tsw and many, many others!

The Google Lat Long blog has announced that Google has just added 12 more US cities to their street view coverage, bringing their total coverage to, um.. lots. The new cities added are as follows:

• Albany and Schenectady, NY
• Boise, ID
• Juneau, AK
• Kansas City, MO
• Manchester, NH
• Milwaukee, WI
• Research Triangle Park (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), NC
• San Antonio, TX
• Salt Lake City, UT

And presumably just for today (because today is Valentine’s Day in case you’d forgotten), it seems the little Street View guy is standing on a little love heart.

Aww, puke.

(It’s Island Week 2 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. For about a week.)

Pollepel Island is located in the Hudson River, New York. A characterless lump of rock, it would have been completely uninteresting had Francis Bannerman not decided to build a castle on the island, and then fill it with weapons…

This was in the late 1800s and Bannerman, a Scottish immigrant, and the world’s largest buyer of surplus military equipment was doing a roaring trade in munitions. When he purchased most of the captured goods from the Spanish American war he needed somewhere to store it all, preferably somewhere where large amounts of gunpowder would be safe.

So he purchased Pollepel Island and set about building an imitation Scottish castle of his own design, complete with lookout turrets and a moat. The buildings took 17 years to complete and feature giant concrete text across the side which reads “Bannerman’s Island Arsenal”.

Years later, the family sold the island back to New York State who for a short time operated tours around the castle. Although all the munitions had been removed, in 1969 a fire of “unknown origin” destroyed the building’s interiors, making it too dangerous to visit. Today, a trust group hope to stabilise the castle and re-open it for tours.

More info on the castle at its official website, the Hudson river site, and of course Wikipedia.

Thanks to Marc Cohen and Bill Parco.

A small German church has laid a bold claim to the title of “World’s most squinty building“.

Located in the town of Bad Frankenhausen, the bell tower of a 14th century church has been measured at an angle of 4.5 degrees to the vertical. With the backing of the Guinness Book of World Records, the town hopes to steal the limelight from the well know Leaning tower of Pisa and its puny 3.97 degree angle.

The folks in Italy responded to the announcement with barely more than a “meh”.

However, the nearby German town of Suurhusen kicked up fuss with their leaning church tower of 5.07 degrees, claiming this to be the true title holder¹.

Google Earth users might ask what all the fuss is about as, from appearances, the cities of New York and Dallas must hold the title with their precarious leaning skyscrapers.

These towers are, of course, not leaning at all. They are at the points where two differently angled aerial photographs have been stitched together.

Previously on Google Sightseeing we’ve seen The Leaning Tower of Pisa, Leaning Tower of Niles and the intentionally leaning Kio Towers which, at 15 degrees to the vertical, must surely be a world record contender?

Thanks: Sunday Telegraph, Craig Simpson, Simone, Jeff Cutter & Catdoor