The San Francisco Bay Bridge has been shut down for the weekend to allow workers to roll a section of the old bridge away, and roll in a temporary section, while they build the new permanent bridge. Download the video here showing how they'll do it. [more inside]
posted by gingerbeer on Sep 3, 2009 - 61 comments

The alphabet in satellite imagery of Slavonia. [via]
posted by parudox on Jun 29, 2009 - 7 comments

North Korea has a reputation as one of the most secretive, authoritarian, repressive countries in the world. But that doesn't stop Curtis Melvin, a PhD student at George Mason University, from trying to shine some light into the country's dark corners l His North Korea Economy Watch site, which includes The most authoritative map of North Korea on Google Earth l Gulags, Nukes and a Water Slide: Citizen Spies Lift North Korea's Veil.
posted by nickyskye on Jun 2, 2009 - 39 comments

Hacking the Sky: Robert Simpson writes astronomy tools for use with Google Earth, Google Sky, and Twitter.
posted by Upton O'Good on Mar 4, 2009 - 5 comments

Star Viewer ― merging Google Earth (Sky) with Hubblecast videos to learn more about what you're seeing in the night sky. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Feb 17, 2009 - 4 comments

Google Earth moves to square centimeter resolution, when it comes to art at Madrid's Prado Museum. Zoom in on 14-gigapixel images (about 1400 times the detail of a standard 10-gigapixel camera) of some of the museum's masterpieces, via Google Earth or Google Maps (start here). It's like putting your nose right up to the painting. Some details at Google Blog. Be sure to watch the how-it-was-done video.
posted by beagle on Jan 14, 2009 - 40 comments

What a month for Google Earth. Its breathtaking updated 3D New York City skyline features textured photos of hundreds of buildings. It has doubled its US coverage and expanded Street View imagery by 22 times. But it also became the subject of a failed legal petition in India demanding it blur sensitive areas in the country. Supposedly, it had agreed to do this nearly two years before the Mumbai attack. Despite the bad timing, an Indian rival plans to sharpen the competition. Google Maps and Earth allegedly blur sensitive sites and a few questionably sensitive landmarks. However, as yet undeterred by security and privacy controversy, Google is adding GeoEye's satellite imagery to Google Earth next month.
posted by terranova on Dec 19, 2008 - 27 comments

Using images from Google Earth, scientists have determined that grazing cattle and deer align themselves with the Earth's magnetic field.
posted by Knappster on Aug 25, 2008 - 89 comments

NPR article on World Where's Waldo Link to the website A Canadian woman made a giant waldo and put it on top of her house and is waiting for the google earth satellites to pick him up.
posted by majikstreet on Apr 16, 2008 - 14 comments

Building on the ideas of Microsoft's Photosynth, flickr's geotagging, and Google's Panoramio, Viewfinder aims to organize photographs spatially in 3D worlds such as Google Earth. See it in action.
posted by mullingitover on Apr 9, 2008 - 9 comments

Native Names Projects by the Coeur d'Alene Tribe GIS Program and the Hawaii Board on Geographic Names are adding audio pronunciation guides to geospatial place-name datasets in several on-line mapping formats. [more inside]
posted by mmahaffie on Apr 3, 2008 - 5 comments

Discoveries made using satellite imagery, particularly via Google Earth, have made headlines in the blue and green before. Increasingly high-resolution photos, combined with obsessive interest, have lead inevitably to the next step: interpretation and analysis of spots on the Earth's surface for which information is restricted, censored, or classified, such as the preparedness of military defenses in North Korea and Iran, or the viability of Saudi Arabia's next big oil play. Of course, not all mapping is benevolent.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul on Mar 13, 2008 - 9 comments

The of Battlefields and Bibliophiles blog has a fun quiz. Check your knowledge of American Civil War battlefields by guessing which battleground is featured in the Google Earth images. Answers here. [more inside]
posted by marxchivist on Feb 6, 2008 - 5 comments

Construction of the World's Highest Bridge, Millau Viaduct in France, which is slightly higher than the Eiffel Tower. It is now included in a list of Google Earth extremes. World's most interesting bridges. Gallery of beautiful world bridges. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Oct 5, 2007 - 23 comments

An Unfortunate View From the Sky. The U.S. Navy has decided to spend as much as $600,000 for landscaping and architectural modifications to obscure the fact that one its building complexes looks like a swastika from the air.
posted by brain_drain on Sep 26, 2007 - 70 comments

We've seen that one picture of earth at night. And we all know what Google Earth is. But someone has put the two together. Be sure to check out the map overlays, including the dusk map.
posted by philomathoholic on Aug 30, 2007 - 33 comments

Because everyone loves a good superlative, the Google Earth Community's "Huge and Unique" page lists the world's tallest, deepest, longest, widest & general all-around most of everything there is. With pictures! Found via.
posted by jonson on Aug 10, 2007 - 13 comments

Fighter jets, overturned tractor trailers, WW II bombers, cars parked on walls, and more of The Strangest Sights in Google Earth
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Jul 27, 2007 - 53 comments

Have you played with Google Earth recently? You can track flights live and in 3-D, or watch an animation of global cloud cover over the last 10 days, or simply make Google Earth prettier using NASA images. Google Earth isn't limited to the current, you can also enable historical maps from the 1700s, and view an animation that will show you what will happen in the future to New York and San Francisco if the sea levels rise. Google Earth can also shed light on previous MeFi discussions, from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (and, indeed many other ship wrecks) to the discussion over America's top 150 buildings, now in all of their 3-D glory.
posted by blahblahblah on May 10, 2007 - 26 comments

Atlas Gloves: A DIY hand gesture interface for Google Earth.
posted by brundlefly on Apr 21, 2007 - 18 comments

How to Create an Aerial Panorama from Google Earth. The Digitally Distributed Environments blog, and others following their tutorial, have created Google Earth panoramas of Belgium, Moscow, Paris, New York, London and the Sydney Olympic Site. They also note Panogames, who use a similar process to create panoramas from videogame worlds. This follows their Frank Lloyd Wright architectural/videogame walkthrough demo using the Half Life 2 engine [mefi thread] following which they appear hard at work formalising a clear method for importing CAD models into Half Life 2 for architectural visualisations.
posted by nthdegx on Sep 9, 2006 - 11 comments

Google mislays Tibet. Tech news site The Register uses Google Earth to do a virtual flyover of Tibet Tibet Autonomous Region. They see lots of neat stuff, including railways, bridges, and the (former) Northwest Nuclear Weapons Research & Design Academy. Among other things.
posted by Drunken_munky on Aug 20, 2006 - 23 comments

Samarra is in the news. The modern city is small, but built on the colossal ruins of the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. Google Earth reveals amazing details of the ancient city, one of the largest archaeological sites in the world.
posted by grahamwell on Feb 24, 2006 - 16 comments

Seen anyone on Google Earth lately?
posted by divabat on Feb 17, 2006 - 33 comments

The Mirror World ...a virtual tour through Seattle, WA, augmented with clips from Google Earth/Maps. [note: Quicktime]
posted by crunchland on Aug 27, 2005 - 7 comments

Use the free 7 day trial while it's available! This lil program lets you zoom in pretty darn close on just about any spot in the world. And it is FREAKING COOL. I don't have much better commentary than that, sorry. You can zoom around to your favorite locations, tilt the camera, show all road names, rotate views - and once you've got a bunch of stuff plugged in its really neat to just click between them and watch the flyby. I can't believe this isn't a double post, but couldn't find it on search. Have fun!
posted by glenwood on Nov 21, 2004 - 67 comments

Earth Viewer compiles satellite imagery on the fly to produce a photo-realistic, spinnable, zoomable model of the entire Earth, right on your computer. And I mean zoomable -- one slider takes you smoothly from seeing the entire globe down to seeing individual people queuing to get into the Louvre...
posted by chrismear on May 31, 2002 - 11 comments