Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


street view

Street View portals to Mars, the Moon and Atlantis

Recently, we had a look at recent additions to Street View. We also included a map of changes over the past month. There were two spots in the ‘changes’ map that we found particularly interesting.

The first is in the Atlantic Ocean and upon closer inspection is very close to an underwater mountain named ‘Atlantis Seamount’. We were able to see the blue Street View indicator in Google Earth but were unable to enter Street View at that location.

However, in Google Maps you can enter the Street View, but you get instantly teleported to Santes Creus Monastery in Catalonia, Spain.


Santes Creus Monastery, Catalonia, Spain. See in Street View

The second location is in Angola. This time we were able to see it in both Google Maps and Google Earth and it turns out to be a portal to the Moon!


Portal to the moon found in Angola.


If you enter Street View at coordinates -9.097507,15.484863 in Angola, you will see Lunar Street View imagery. See in Google Maps.

We had heard about both Lunar and Martian Street View imagery before. Thank you to GEB reader ‘poli’ for giving us a link to a Martian image in the comments of this post. We had previously not managed to find a way to view it from within Google Earth. After we knew what to look for, we tracked down the Martian portal in the province of Papua, Indonesia.


The portal to Mars can be found at coordinates -4.5895946,137.4492225.


Street View imagery on Mars captured by the rover Curiosity. See in Google Maps

Not far north of the Atlantis portal, in the Atlantic Ocean at coordinates 40.571082, -29.539372, there is another Street View portal that takes you to underwater Street View of the Galapagos Islands.

To view the Mars and Moon locations in Google Earth download this KML file.

You cannot view Street View in the ‘Mars’ or ‘Moon’ modes of Google Earth or Google Maps because the ‘yellow man’ is not shown.

As we have mentioned in the past the blue Street View layers tend to show different locations at different zoom levels and the blue markings for the above locations can only be seen when zoomed out quite a long way and not at all in Google Earth for the ‘Mars portal’.

In order to see the blue Street View outlines when zoomed out, first zoom in until you see the yellow man, hold him above the map and then zoom out with the ‘-‘ key on the keyboard. You can also move around with the arrow keys.

If anyone knows of any Street View on Mars or the Moon other than the two photospheres featured above, or if you know of any other portals where entering Street View in one location takes you somewhere totally different, please let us know in the comments.

Street View comes to Réunion

Réunion, a French Island in the Indian Ocean not far from Mauritius, has recently received Street View. We found that although the coverage shown by the blue lines is quite extensive we were not able to access it in a number of areas. For example, Îlet à Cordes shows blue lines but if you try to enter Street View there in either Google Earth or Google Maps it does not succeed.


Changes to Street View between January 28th, 2016 and February 28th, 2016. Changes marked in red. Existing Street View in blue. Large version


See it in Google Maps . With nothing to judge scale by, this volcano looks deceptively small and close. It is actually about 3 km away and has a crater over a kilometre wide at its peak. The whole thing is sitting inside a much larger crater, the edge of which the photo was taken from.


See it in Google Maps. Réunion has some very steep mountains. We thought this spot looked especially beautiful, with the sun just peeping over the mountain.

Other new Street View includes expansions to coverage in Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, The Philippines, Ukraine and Russia. And the Google LatLong blog lets us know about some US stadiums that have received Street View. There is also some new Street View of Ellef Ringnes Island in the far north of Canada. It is dated April 2014, but appears to have only recently been added.


See it in Google Maps. If Réunion was too hot and tropical for you, then try exploring Ellef Ringnes Island in northern Canada.

Adding pictures to Street View

This is part of a series of posts expanding on our Google Earth Blog FAQ.

We get quite a lot of email along the lines of: “Our business / rental property / property for sale is shown in Street View when it was under construction / being renovated and we feel this is negatively impacting us. Please update the Street View.” Google, however, does not capture Street View on demand and for good reason – they would be inundated with requests. But there is nothing stopping you from adding your own pictures to Google Maps and Google Earth and in most situations they will be treated with a greater priority than Street View imagery.

If you already have some good photos of the location, you can easily add them with Google Maps. Simply open the location in the Google Maps side panel either by searching for it or clicking on the place marker. Next, click ‘Add a Photo’ which appears both in the sidebar and as the last item in the list of photos. You can then upload your photo. Google Maps then shows a notice saying your photo will soon be available to be seen by the public. We assume that there is some sort of verification process to ensure that unsuitable photos are not displayed.

We found that you cannot add photos by this method to locations that do not already have markers.


Select a marker on the map (1) and then click ‘Add a Photo’ (either (2) or (3)

An alternative method is to use a smart phone and Google’s Street View app (Android iPhone). This will allow you to take panoramic photos and upload them to Street View with ease. Be sure to turn on your GPS for proper georeferencing. We believe that photos uploaded this way do not need to be attached to a placemark.

For more advanced options see this page from Google which also includes this interesting YouTube video, which has some interesting information about the trekker and how Street View is captured with it.

Google Street View Camera goes Mountaineering and Surfing

Last week we had a look at miniature Street View, where the street view cameras got tiny and toured the world’s largest model railway. For pictures of the camera they used on that project see this article.

Google Street View has also recently gone mountaineering. They have captured Street View on Mont Blanc in the Alps. Read more about it on the Google Lat Long blog.


In addition to a track going all the way up Mont Blanc, there are some individual shots of people climbing on rock or ice.


Google Earth Street View does not display well directly down or directly up. In this image the climber is, unfortunately, in the worst spot of the image.


The same image looks much better in Google Maps

Find the above locations in Google Earth with this KML file. It is not easy to see what other locations are available in Google Earth, but if you open the above placemarks and then just click randomly on the image you will discover other scenic locations.

In preparation for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Google has been gathering Street View in the area, including sending the trekker for a ride on a ‘Stand Up Paddling’ board. See a picture here. The imagery is not yet in Google Maps or Google Earth.

Street View has been as far afield as Greenland and as we have seen above, up mountains and on the ocean. It has been under the ocean and in forest canopies. So where next? My guess would be that with the advent of cheap drones the next big thing will be Street View in the air. For fairly flat terrain it doesn’t really make sense to have 360 degree photos from the air and aerial photography would be the norm. This would be indistinguishable from current aerial photography other than being higher resolution. Frank’s kite photography is an example of this. However, for cities and forests 360 degree photos would make sense as we saw for the Amazon zip-line photography.

Miniature Street View

Miniature Wunderland is claimed to be the largest miniature model railway in the world. So, how do you go about capturing Street View of a miniature railway? With miniature cameras on miniature Street View cars of course!

Actually viewing the Street View in Google Earth proved a little difficult. The whole building was captured in 2012 with ordinary Street View and the location of that is shown by blue lines. The new miniature Street View captured in December 2015 is classified as ‘see inside’, which shows as orange dots. Unfortunately only a few of the dots show in Google Earth – there are more in Google Maps. We were, after some trial and error, able to locate all the miniature street View imagery in Google Earth, and once you are in a section you can explore without to much difficulty. We tried creating placemarks so that we could share the start locations but found that Google Earth placemarks can be quite unreliable with Street View. Probably the best ways to explore the new Street View is with this site or Google Maps


There is a lot more than just model railways.