Fun with Google Earth

I love playing with this software. One day I was looking for
airplanes captured in air by the satellite. I found something very
interesting.

Go to DFW airport and follow the western N-S runway to the north
slowly and you will see planes and the shadows they cast. Count the
planes and count the shadows. Eventually you will come to a lake
where there are two shadows - But no airplanes!
I have yet to figure this one out.

Russell Patterson writes:
I love playing with [Google Earth]. One day I was looking for
airplanes captured in air by the satellite. I found something very
interesting. ... a lake where there are two shadows - But no airplanes!
I have yet to figure this one out.

You found a joint between images taken at different times. They're
all over the place; if the images are pretty closely aligned, they
apparently do some processing to make the joint less obvious, resulting
in odd little jogs in straight roads.

I haven't rechecked it lately, but there used to be a horrible joint
(too bad to patch up like that) right in the middle of midtown Manhattan,
where the skyscrapers on opposite sites of it seem to lean at different
angles. These high-resolution city images are taken from airplanes,
not satellites, and in this particular case I guess they were taken from
flight paths over opposite sites of the island.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto | "True excitement lies in doing
| 'sdb /unix /dev/kmem'" -- Pontus Hedman

My text in this article is in the public domain.

On Thu, 17 May 2007 05:41:40 -0000, Mark Brader wrote:


Russell Patterson writes:
I love playing with [Google Earth]. One day I was looking for
airplanes captured in air by the satellite. I found something very
interesting. ... a lake where there are two shadows - But no airplanes!
I have yet to figure this one out.

You found a joint between images taken at different times. They're
all over the place; if the images are pretty closely aligned, they
apparently do some processing to make the joint less obvious, resulting
in odd little jogs in straight roads.

I worked with some GIS software where they had stitched maps from wildly
different time periods. It was especially amusing where a two lane
road would stitch up to a 6 lane blvd with a center median.

Russell Patterson wrote:

I love playing with this software. One day I was looking for
airplanes captured in air by the satellite. I found something very
interesting.

Go to DFW airport and follow the western N-S runway to the north
slowly and you will see planes and the shadows they cast. Count the
planes and count the shadows. Eventually you will come to a lake
where there are two shadows - But no airplanes!
I have yet to figure this one out.

Look a little further afield. Notice that the first airborne plane has a
shadow quite close to it, but as the planes climb the shadows are further
west.

In article ,
AZ Nomad wrote:
On Thu, 17 May 2007 05:41:40 -0000, Mark Brader wrote:
Russell Patterson writes:
I love playing with [Google Earth]. One day I was looking for
airplanes captured in air by the satellite. I found something very
by plane
interesting. ... a lake where there are two shadows - But no airplanes!
I have yet to figure this one out.

You found a joint between images taken at different times. They're
all over the place; if the images are pretty closely aligned, they
apparently do some processing to make the joint less obvious, resulting
in odd little jogs in straight roads.

Santa Fe Airport used to have a joint and there is a good one which is
on the East part of Oak Ridge Natl. Lab with their security zone.

Web sites exist for planes caught in the air (perhaps the most
impressive is the C-5 being refueled by a KC-10).

I worked with some GIS software where they had stitched maps from wildly
different time periods. It was especially amusing where a two lane
road would stitch up to a 6 lane blvd with a center median.

The MS Terraserver also has this problem. Both MS and Google's staff
are light on GIS experts and naive internet programmer heavy. Over laying
TIGR data (I was with Jim Gray when his staff spoke about some of this in
Berkeley) had lines when real roads made curves.

The problem isn't just spatial. If you want a really good temporal one,
I found based on NBC's where in the world is Matt Lauer: if you go to
Dubai (I was going to have a business trip later this year, but it got
put on hold), you don't see the palm's islands or the world at the
higher flying heights, then they just pop up at the lower altitudes.
The hotel's H helipad is nicely visible. It's all WSW from where GE
puts you when you enter Dubai.

There's web sites for GE tourism. It all depends what you want to see,
and coverage at high latitudes is scant.

--

In article ,
Russell Patterson wrote:
I love playing with this software. One day I was looking for
airplanes captured in air by the satellite. I found something very
by planes
interesting.

Go to DFW airport and follow the western N-S runway to the north
slowly and you will see planes and the shadows they cast. Count the
planes and count the shadows. Eventually you will come to a lake
where there are two shadows - But no airplanes!
I have yet to figure this one out.

If you think that's interesting, there are people looking for boats
and ships in the ocean. Some of them make visible wakes.
But there are a few which don't. This has a few people with some
knowledge a bit paranoid.



--

Eugene Miya wrote:
If you think that's interesting, there are people looking for boats
and ships in the ocean. Some of them make visible wakes.
But there are a few which don't. This has a few people with some
knowledge a bit paranoid.

For the most curious example of this I can find, enter Solingen, Germany
into GE. Zoom in all the way. Just northwest of the centre marker is
the left half of a van driving along the street, with no other noticeable
seam between the two images.

--
K.

Lang may your lum reek.

On Thu, 17 May 2007 16:29:40 -0400, Dave Smith
wrote:

Russell Patterson wrote:

I love playing with this software. One day I was looking for
airplanes captured in air by the satellite. I found something very
interesting.

Go to DFW airport and follow the western N-S runway to the north
slowly and you will see planes and the shadows they cast. Count the
planes and count the shadows. Eventually you will come to a lake
where there are two shadows - But no airplanes!
I have yet to figure this one out.

Look a little further afield. Notice that the first airborne plane has a
shadow quite close to it, but as the planes climb the shadows are further
west.
I did look further away for that reason, but still no aircraft. As
far as the pictures being taken at different times, the shadows from
telephone pole seem to be pointing in the same direction all around
between the shadows and where the planes should be.

On Thu, 17 May 2007 00:30:54 -0400, Russell Patterson
wrote:

I love playing with this software. One day I was looking for
airplanes captured in air by the satellite. I found something very
interesting.

Go to DFW airport and follow the western N-S runway to the north
slowly and you will see planes and the shadows they cast. Count the
planes and count the shadows. Eventually you will come to a lake
where there are two shadows - But no airplanes!
I have yet to figure this one out.

Another interesting location is Bremerton, WA. Look at the naval base
where all the subs are tied together. Most subs are rounded fore and
aft. There is one there that seems to have a sharp point fore and
aft. Must be some experimental sub. I'll bet it's fast!

"Russell Patterson" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 17 May 2007 00:30:54 -0400, Russell Patterson
wrote:

Another interesting location is Bremerton, WA. Look at the naval base
where all the subs are tied together. Most subs are rounded fore and
aft. There is one there that seems to have a sharp point fore and
aft. Must be some experimental sub. I'll bet it's fast!

It's Russian. ;-) KM
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