Coolest use of Google Maps

Posted May 27, 2005 * Comments(7)

This post kicked off my discoveries.

Norfolk Naval Station, complete with several aircraft carriers.

I’ve just wasted half an hour looking at The Pentagon and the Washington Memorial, Miramar – Fightertown, USA (the former location of “Top Gun”, before it moved to Fallon Air Station) and Area 51. It’s the white blob in the centre of the screen (Groom Lake).

I also visited a few fun places, including Legoland and Disneyland.

I found it was easier sometimes to go to the city or town (by postcode) and then look around for what I was after. I sometimes used “normal” Google to get an address, and then feed that into the maps.

Make sure you use the satellite view too!

7 Comments so far

  1. Mark W on May 27th, 2005

    Yesterday I watched the Channel 9 Video on Virtual Earth. It is a bit sucky watching a demo via a Video Camera however they show some neat stuff.

    A lot of it is just a rehash of what is available in Google Maps but the overlay feature is really cool. It frustrates me that Google Maps doesn’t have it so will be interesting to see how long before it does.

    For anyone interested, this is where I am staying for the next month and this is where our User’s Conference is next week.

  2. Radford on May 31st, 2005

    The Area 51 shot is very interesting. I wonder why it’s all white. Have the images supplied to Google been censored, or is it a function of the photography (an over exposed section or similar)? Is it a big salt pan or something similar? I wonder what the boundaries are for the site.

    Cool stuff tho. :)

    Incidentally, WA has a decent online map / aerial photograph site. http://www.landonline.com.au/skyviewwa/content/asp/skyviewwa_index.asp?product_group_id=78 . Unfortunately it needs an active X control to work.

  3. mlambie on May 31st, 2005

    The white spot is a salt lake – Groom Lake to be precise. You often hear A51 referred to as Groom Lake, or Dreamland.

  4. Philippe on June 1st, 2005

    I think it would be possible to zoom in alot more (with the satelites) than the images on google maps. You can see quite a few details though! It’s interesting, that the government agreed to all the images, especially with that anti-terror threath..

    Does anyone know what these satelites are really capable of?

  5. philippe::niquille » Blog Archive » google maps (satellite) on June 1st, 2005

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  6. lambie.org » Blog Archive » Google Sightseeing on June 11th, 2005

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