With high-resolution images all over the globe, Google Earth has captured many sporting events actually in-progress, so today we proudly present – The Top 10 different sports you can actually see people playing on Google Earth!

As a bonus, we’ve tried to work out how each game is going, and to make things even more difficult for ourselves, we’ve limited our search to ballgames only.

10. First let’s look at the 2nd of the 18-hole Las Vegas Country Club Golf Course, where we see the pin lying on the grass and the person closest playing their putt. Everyone else is standing around, probably telling him to hurry up.

9. As the world’s most popular sport, there must be hundreds of games of football being played at any one second. Here we see students playing “the beautiful game” at the University of Tokyo. However, this looks like it’s just a practise session as there’s no goalie at either end.

8. There’s people playing tennis all over the globe but for the top 10 we’ve chosen these two games of doubles being played on clay in Germany.

The eastern game is in full swing, and on the western court the players are standing in their service positions, and judging from the shadows it looks as if the southern team are about to serve!

7. There’s a good turnout for Lawn Bowls at Bell Vue Park Bowling Green in Newport, Wales. Sadly the bowls are just too small to be seen so we can’t tell how the games are going.

6. The stands are filling up at Yankee stadium, and there’s a couple of people on the field, but we’re a little too early for the game.

Hmm, we’ll need another baseball game in progress… here’s four!

In the thumbnail we see a batter up at the plate, and I think the bases are loaded.

5. The Shay in Halifax, England is also used for football games, but today it’s a home game for local rugby league team Halifax RLFC.

The ball is probably somewhere in the west of the pitch and the team to the north are on the offensive.

4. They’re playing lacrosse in Salamanca, New York. You can tell that it’s a men’s game as there are 20 players on the pitch (women’s lacrosse would have 24 players).

3. Here is a cricket match being played in the village of Hoylandswaine, north of Sheffield. It looks like they’re between plays, as the batsman has stepped back from the wicket to the west and we can see the other batsman and the bowler at the eastern end.

2. Here we see a packed gameday at Seahawks Stadium (now Qwest field) with 63,588 people watching the Nevada Wolf Pack at Washington State Cougars on August 31, 2002.

Google Earth Community member GEChump managed to identify the exact play seen in the photo, making this 11:37 remaining in the second quarter with the game tied at 7.

The Cougars eventually went on to win 31-7.

1. Finally, we find a tense one-on-one street-Basketball game being played in Rolde, Netherlands. Due to the left-hand player’s poor defence the right-hand player has just taken a shot at the basket, however they’ve missed and the ball is rebounding back.

Have you found a ball game on Google Earth not mentioned here? Let us know!

Thanks: heamit, mike, Kegan, seamus, Jeff, John Culbert, Jeni, Kristen, Mark, shuvman, vancantona, silkobilko, Crebbin, patmonahan, Majoska, pttech, Adam Rus, Ian, Arlene and the Google Earth Community.

We’re getting in a very Christmassy spirit here at GGSS HQ, so we were very pleased to receive this submission of a pond in the shape of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer!

Well at this time of year it’s a Rudolph-shaped pond anyway, as the owner strings lights round the edge – including a large, strategically-placed red one. The rest of the year this is just a plain ol’ common-or-garden John Deere logo-shaped pond…

Thanks to Michael O’Donnell.

(It’s Island Week all this week at GGSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. Catchy name, huh?)

The tiny volcanic island of Iwo Jima, part of the Ogasawara Islands, is just over 1000km south of Tokyo. It was the location of the Battle of Iwo Jima, one of the deadliest battles of WWII, and you can still see wrecked ships along the coastline.

Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi was also where the famous “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” photograph was taken. Supposedly the most reproduced photograph in history, it was used as the inspiration for the USMC War memorial in Washington.

Thanks: SnowManson, John, Stephan Segraves, Thomas, Tyler Casella & Peggy

I can’t quite believe it myself, but despite what I said a year ago today, the 2nd (and now actually annual) Google Sightseeing Volcano Day is upon us!

Things have changed on Google Maps a lot since then (and even more so on Google Earth), including image updates for some of the volcanoes we featured last year, so that’s where we’ll start.

Mount St. Helens (Wikipedia page) isn’t yet in full high-res, but the imagery is much better than it was last year. Very cool when you zoom in a bit.

I was going to feature Krakatoa today by the way, but it seems that the images which people described in their submissions have been removed – it doesn’t feature in Google Earth either unfortunately, so it’ll just have to wait till next year :-/

More later!

You can all rest easy tonight; I’ve discovered peace on earth!

The first bit of peace is found in Watershed Park, a dense woodland near Redmond with trails for cycling, horse riding, etc. A local cyclist took this ground level photo.

There’s twice as much peace in the back yard of Yates Mill Elementary School, although the larger of the two is a bit faded.

Thanks: Sl0play & Brad Tollmann