April 07, 2005
From Somewhere in Illinois, Dave sez "Hi"
Found via Google Maps Sightseeing. Also of interest -- the Boneyard at the Pima Air & Space Museum and the GIANT compass at Edwards AFB (check the zoom level -- this thing is huge).
Or Illinois. Whatever, no one cares about those middle states anyway, right? (Couldn't find the "apparently there is some kind of foreign land between the coasts" onion article, but this one is just as good).
The funny thing about that Pima boneyard is how close it is to I-10. I've heard about that thing before but never realized I was driving right past it and it was only about 2 miles off the expressway. I don't know if it said anything about this but you can see pictures of B-52s sawed into pieces and laying out for the satellites to see. Dismantling our nuclear bombers was part of one of the nuclear arms treaties.
You need to go to zoom 4 to get most of Fermilab on the map. You can see the main injector and the Tevatron, and the three lines pointing off to the northeast are where they can fling the particles/anti-particles into targets ("neutrino", "proton" and "meson" areas) if they don't want to just smash the counter-rotating beams (compare detailed site map).
I'm actually confused a little because I thought the neutrino target would be on the northwest side of the complex so they would travel off to MINOS in Minnesota. I see a little MINOS complex off to the left of the Wilson center but I wonder how the beamline gets over there.
I can't find the supercollider. Can you find it?
More large type -- "LUECKE" is right near us, in Smithville (just past Bastrop). I really want to know what's up with these... there must be a directory of them somewhere, for pilots or something.
Do you see the zoom level on LUECKE? That would be zoom 6, and if you compare it to Austin at the same zoom level you see that the distance from the L to the E is about Research Blvd. to Ben White. Also, if you zoom in on the word you see that it is made of trees and not cleared brush or something.
My favorites:
Mt. St. Helens
The Grand Canyon
Niagra Falls
St. Louis Arch
Boise State
i learned to play ultimate on the field in the upper right corner, above the turf field. called ??? the mudbowl or something?
ah the memories.
somewhere around here is where i tore my ACL the first time, but it seems so different that i can't identify it better than that.
good times.
In the comments for LUECKE there is a link to an explanation of why it is there. It talks about it at the bottom of the page:
"By clearing forest so that a pattern would be visible to landing aircraft, a landowner outside Austin, Texas (see also aerial photo in Lisheron 2000), created a target that is also useful for evaluating spatial resolution of astronaut photographs. The forest was selectively cleared in order to spell the landowner's name 'LUECKE' with the remaining trees (figure 10). According to local surveyors who planned the clearing, the plan was to create letters that were 3100 ´ 1700 ft (944.9 ´ 518.2 m)."
Based on doncarlo's link, it is obvious that the end-to-end length of the word LUECKE is far less than, say, 10 miles. Therefore, my previous comparison was faulty and the reason must be that Google Maps do not preserve the same zoom/resolution across the entire database. In other words, you don't see a scale bar on the map because sometimes it is x miles/inch and other times it is y miles/inch even though both had the same "zoom level" setting.
This also casts into doubt the relative sizes of other things linked to (like the Edwards AFB compass, which is probably big but maybe not as big as you might have thought).
I submitted a bug to Google when Maps first launched requesting a scale bar, but perhaps they didn't include it on purpose because they knew that when they integrated the satellite stuff it wouldn't work.
Naw, I think you're doing it wrong. On this map, LUECKE is the same size as the size slider, which is the same size as the distance from the congress st bridge to 24th&Lamar, and as the distance from 45th&Airport to Lamar&Airport. (Follow the river NW from LUECKE to find Austin). Google maps reports this as 2.4 miles, which is consistent with 6 letters 600m wide. Since I've smoothly scrolled from LUECKE to Airport Blvd, I'm confident the scale isn't changing.
Hey, isn't one of you guys from eastern Virginia? You might enjoy viewing the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge Tunnel outside of Newport News. More ground-level and aerial photos here.
That area is nutty for bridge-tunnels. If you zoom out one level, you'll see that to the east of the Monitor-Merrimac is the older Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel. The thing to the west of the Monitor-Merrimac is the James River Bridge, which is not a bridge-tunnel. Weak.
Pan a bit further east and you'll see one of the Seven Engineering Wonders of the Modern World (at least in 1965), the 17.6-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. It's celebrating 40 years of giving playas in the 757 easy access to their Delmarva hos.
There's a little article in Wired News about finding neat things in the satellite maps. Also, there are plenty of new posts on the Google Sightseeing page since this was originally posted with more added every day. All sorts of fun.
A recent post by my hero Steinski led me to waste some time traipsing thru Google sightseeng. Some highlights:
- Beast with two backs spotted in the Netherlands
- Continuing the top of the crops post, here's the crop circles category page
- Animals (actual, not crop circle) on the African savannah
- Animals (adorable crop circle, not actual)
- Kemal Ataturk
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More good stuff, from the comments at "GMaps Sightseeing" -- Cape Canaveral, annotated; the Pima boneyard from ground level; the SF 49ers driving from the 35-yard line; mygmaps.com.
posted by mrflip at 10:56PM CST on April 07