Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


Colorising Black and White Historical Aerial Imagery

We were recently contacted by Zachary Bortolot an Associate Professor in the Geographic Science Program at James Madison University. He has been developing a method of realistically colorising black and white historical aerial images. His method is automated and intelligently transfers colour from recent colour imagery of a location to historical black and white imagery of the same location. His algorithm appears to be able to handle changing landscapes although exact details as to how it does it are not given. Read more about it on his website.

You can also download some sample image overlays to view in Google Earth. Below are just small samples of the images, comparing them with Google Earth imagery. Be sure to download the overlays to explore all the imagery.

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Colorized aerial image, Palm Springs, California, 1972 vs Google Earth image.

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Colorized aerial image, Harrisonburg, Virginia, 1974 vs Google Earth image.

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Colorized aerial image, Washington, D.C., 1951 vs Google Earth image.

In the case of Washington D.C. Google Earth has an aerial image from 1949 but the colorized image is better quality.

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Colorized aerial image, Washington, D.C., 1951 vs Google Earth historical imagery 1949.

Most countries around the world have large collections of aerial imagery gathered over the years, much of which have never been digitised. It would be great to see more of this imagery in Google Earth and even better if it is colourised.

Google Street View goes to the International Space Station

Yesterday Google announced on its blog that they have added views of the International Space Station (ISS) to Google Street View. The Google blog post is written by Thomas Pesquet, Astronaut at the European Space Agency (ESA), who spent six months aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as a flight engineer. The ISS Street View is not currently available in Google Earth, so explore it here.

The ISS is in orbit around the earth and so does not have a specific location so Google has decided to place the Street View in Building 9 – Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The building houses mockups of every major pressurized module on the International Space Station. It is also not far from the Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center. The Mission Control Center is the building from which flight controllers command, monitor, and plan operations for the ISS.

Interestingly, one of the mockup modules has a user contributed photosphere and we couldn’t identify the equivalent module in the new Street View. If any of our readers can tell us which it is, let us know in the comments.

The Google Blog post incorrectly states that this is the first time Street View imagery has been captured beyond planet Earth. In fact, both the Moon and Mars have had Street View for quite some time.

Another interesting comment is that this is the first time that Street View has included annotations. This is such a new feature that it is not yet working on Google’s dedicated Street View site, only in Google Maps. Let’s hope the feature comes to Google Earth too – including the ability to annotate using KML.


Annotations in Street View is a new feature.

Man made ‘Fairy Circles’

‘Fairy Circles’ are a phenomena that occurs in the Namib Desert involving circular patches of bare ground forming striking patterns visible in satellite imagery. We have looked at a number of similar phenomenon around the world caused variously by ants, termites and worms. Last month, we had a look at some Fairy Circle-like patterns in the Northern Cape, South Africa, and on reading the post, my sister Clare, alerted us to similar patterns found in northern Zambia.


Fairy Circle-like patterns in northern Zambia.

Closer inspection reveals the clearings are for cultivation:

The reason for the interesting pattern is the method of agriculture being employed in the region. It is locally known as the Chitemene System. The soils of the region are nutrient-poor. Trees are coppiced and the branches brought to a central point and burnt. The ash is then spread over the field, which fertilises the soil, allowing crops to be grown for several years. The pattern is caused by the need for a larger area than the cultivated field to supply the necessary vegetation. Fields are moved after a number of years. In the above image we can see fields of various ages.


In this image we can actually see the burnt areas in the centres of some fields.

Commercial farmers can afford to buy fertiliser so are less restricted. We believe the spottiness in the field below is due to termite activity.

We also came across a vast region that had recently experienced bush fires. We can see what appear to be termite mounds and the path of the fire appears to flow like water across the landscape:

It would appear that in some places, fields have been made around termite mounds. This presumably means the termites make the soil a bit more fertile. Strangely, this seems to be the opposite of what we see in large commercial fields that tend to have bare patches where termite mounds used to be.

For the locations featured above, download this KML file.

Game of Thrones in Street View and Google Earth

In celebration of the season seven premiere of popular TV series “Game of Thrones”, Google has created a Street View collection of various locations used in the filming of the series.

Although we highly recommend using Google Maps to explore Street View as the Google Maps Street View interface is better than Google Earth’s, it is also worth visiting the locations in Google Earth as it provides a better perspective of the relative locations, as well as featuring 3D imagery in some of the locations. Some locations have the old type of 3D model and some have the new 3D mesh.


Water Gardens of Dorne (Real Alcázar in Seville, Spain)


The Long Bridge of Volantis (A bridge in Córdoba, Spain)

To find the locations in Google Earth, download this KML file.

Homeowner mows ‘A-hole’ message on lawn over a dispute with neighbour

A recent story in the news about a homeowner in Dungeness, Washington, USA who, as a result of a dispute with a neighbour wrote a giant message saying ‘A hole’ and an arrow pointing at his neighbour.

Find the location in Google Earth with this KML file.

The above image is from August 2016, but it is clear from historical imagery that it was created some time between 2011 and 2013 and maintained since then.

Quite often large messages seen in Google Earth imagery are intended to be seen from the ground or from passing aircraft. Writing messages specifically for Google Earth can be tricky as you never know when your area will next be photographed. If your message is not designed to last, it may never be captured. Here in Cape Town, Google Earth gets multiple images per month, but the imagery is from satellites and relatively low resolution so the writing must be much bigger. In the US, and other regions that get higher resolution aerial imagery, the frequency of updates tends to be much lower – about once every three years for the continental US. Several messages we looked at in 2015 have not yet appeared in Google Earth imagery. This message created by Hyundai was short lived and although the region has been updated since then the message is not visible. Another project consisting of graffiti on a disused runway is probably longer lasting but the region has not yet been updated. We also heard from one of our readers that he has been regularly mowing a message to his daughter in the hopes that it will one day be captured in Google Earth imagery. We keep an eye on the location, but it hasn’t been updated since 2013.

For some other rude messages in Google Earth see this post on phallic symbols.