Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


Timothy Whitehead

New Google Earth Imagery – August 5th, 2014

[Update: The map and KML in this post automatically updates as Google updates their Maps Gallery version. As of this update, the map being displayed is for August 13th, 2014.]

It appears Google pushed out some fresh imagery updates a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to sharp-eyed GEB reader ‘Maarten’ for letting us know about it.

To see which areas have been updated, see the map below from Google’s Maps Gallery.

You can also view it in Google Earth, using this KML file. The new imagery is in both Google Earth and Google Maps.

It is important to remember that although the update was done on August 5th, the actual imagery is slightly older. Most of it seems to have been taken some time in the last two years, although some is quite recent – where I live in Cape Town, South Africa, the new imagery is from June 11th, 2014.

About Timothy Whitehead

Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

Creative cat tracking in Google Earth

Here’s a fun use of Google Earth and GPS — tracking cats. It started when Tiana Warner at safe.com found out about a way to track cats:

Where do cats go when they’re outside all day and night? What do they do? How do they entertain themselves? Is there a secret cat meeting place in every major city? When Safers found out about Cat Tracker, we couldn’t resist.

The result is pretty neat.

cat tracker

While it’s mostly a fun little project, the technology behind it is remarkably complex. Get the GPS data from Movebank in JSON format, flatten it, create a “convex hull” around the main area, clean up GPS anomalies, rank the cats based on travel area sizes, then push it out via KML. Here is a KML file to view it for yourself in Google Earth.

You can read more on the Safe Software Blog.

About Timothy Whitehead

Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

Google Earth instrumental in discovery of new chameleon species

Back in 2005 Julian Bayliss, a biologist at London’s Kew Gardens, discovered a brand new rainforest that had previously never been studied — and he found it using Google Earth. We told you about it in May this year, and you can watch a short video about the discovery below.

Since then, many new species have been discovered at the location, known as Mozambique’s ‘sky islands’, including a snake, a butterfly, and most recently, the recent discovery of four new pygmy chameleon species.

Rhampholeon nebulauctor. Credit: Julian Bayliss.
Rhampholeon nebulauctor. Credit: Julian Bayliss.

Rhampholeon tilburyi. Credit: Krystal A. Tolley.
Rhampholeon tilburyi. Credit: Krystal A. Tolley.

Rampholeon Maspictus. Credit: William R. Branch.
Rampholeon Maspictus. Credit: William R. Branch.

Rhampholeon Bruessoworum. Credit: Julian Bayliss.
Rhampholeon Bruessoworum. Credit: Julian Bayliss.

Find the full story on Fauna & Flora International.

About Timothy Whitehead

Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

An alien on the Moon?

We have told you in the past about various news stories reporting apparent alien activity in Google Earth imagery. For example, this story, where sonar tracks from ships were mistaken for an underwater alien base. Or this story where a combination of lighting and image artifacts makes a crater on the moon look like an alien space ship. And, then, there was the secret Mars base. Which, again, is most likely just a result of image artifacts making an ordinary geographical feature look suspiciously regular.

The latest such story comes from a YouTube video posted by YouTuber wowforreeel which has gained over five million views in under a month. It features this image, which at first glance appears to be a human shaped object and its shadow.

Human figure and shadow

However, a quick look at the scale bar at the bottom left reveals that the figure, if real, would have to be hundreds of feet high. So, instead of a human, it would be more like a Colossus as suggested by this article.
A careful look at the surrounding craters reveals that the light in the image is coming from near the bottom of the image and so the apparent shadow is in the wrong direction.

This article on pix11.com quotes a NASA scientist Noah Petro, as saying:

My best guess,” Petro said in a statement to PIX11, “is that it’s something (dust, an eyelash, scratch on the negative) that was on the film. Remember, this was in the pre-digital days when all sorts of nasty things could happen to film.”

So, as with the previous stories, the explanation has to do with how the images were acquired rather than an actual feature on the Moon, but it’s an interesting find nevertheless.


If you wish to see it in Google Earth for yourself, switch to Moon view, and enter these co-ordinates 27°34’26.35″N 19°36’4.75″W in the search box, or you can simply use this KML file to fly to it directly in Google Earth.

About Timothy Whitehead

Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.