My Google Map Blog

The popular British TV Series “Dr Who” Series 8’s premiere episode aired on Saturday, August 23, 2014. The series features a blue British police box known as the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space).

If you search for the address “236 Earls Court Road W.8, London, United Kingdom”, in Google Earth and make sure you turn on you the 3D buildings layer, you can see a 3D model of the TARDIS as seen below. (Or you can fly straight to it using this KML file)

If you enter street view at the exact location of the TARDIS model, you can see the inside of the TARDIS – which is considerably larger than the outside.

If you look around the area in Street View you will see that there really is a blue police box at that location.

The oldest references I could find to this Street View Easter Egg are from August 2013 (for example this article from Time magazine) just in time for the premier of Series 7.

We have previously brought you other stories of Google Street view in unusual places such as under the sea, the temples of Angkor Wat and a corn maize, but this is the first instance of Street View in a part of the world that is technically ‘not of this world’. If you know of any other unusual instances of Street View please let us know in the comments.

The post The TARDIS in Google Earth appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

We have brought you many stories in the past involving Google Earth and wildfire. For example, stories about people and organizations using Google Earth to monitor wildfires in progress, coordinate rescue operations, map global fire data and simulate forest fires.

But, prevention is better than cure, so to take it a step further, here is a story about how Shea Broussard and business partner Tony Shafer created FlameMapper.

Using historical data of fire paths, they map out the ideal places to graze the goats so as to stop wildfires from spreading. They use the Google Earth plugin to display the map on their website and use GPS and the map to decide where to place electric fencing which is moved around to control where the goats graze. The electric fencing also helps to keep mountain lions from eating the goats, but despite this they have lost 5 goats to a local mountain lion over the last 2 years.

The site also shows the current location of the goats. They do not track the mountain lions….

Has it worked? According to Shane:

We have yet to have a big wildfire come through the community. We are about 2 years overdue for a wildfire when you look at the fire history.”

Carefully planned grazing is not the only thing they are doing to prevent fire, they are also planting lots of Oak trees.
Shane:

We are currently growing 12,000 Oak trees with the Los Angeles County Fire Department Forest Division. Oak trees simply reduce fire intensity. Reduced fire intensity can save lives.”

For more, watch this YouTube video by Smile TV or read this story

My sister is a farmer in Livingstone, Zambia, and she too uses goats for creating fire breaks. She doesn’t have anything as sophisticated as FlameMapper, but does use Google Earth and GPS for planning where to put the fire breaks.

The post Using Google Earth and goats to combat wildfires. appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

With the successful launch of the imaging satellite WorldView-3 by DigitalGlobe recently, featuring the latest technology in satellite imaging, it is a good time to take a look at where it all started.

The very first aerial photograph was taken from balloon by the French photographer and balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, in 1858 over Paris, France. However, the photographs he produced no longer exist and therefore the earliest surviving aerial photograph is titled ‘Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It’ and was taken by James Wallace Black in 1860, also from a balloon.

Kite aerial photography was pioneered by British meteorologist E.D. Archibald in 1882.
The most interesting method of aerial photography is pigeon photography, a technique invented in 1907.

By World War I aerial imagery taken from aircraft was being used for reconnaissance and the technology matured rapidly as a result.

The first images from space were taken in 1946 from a suborbital U.S.-launched V-2 rocket.
In 1972 the United States started the Landsat program, the largest program for acquisition of imagery of Earth from space.

Historical imagery was introduced to Google Earth with version 5 in 2009.

The oldest imagery that can currently be found in Google Earth is from 1930, near Toronto, Canada. To view it in Google Earth you need to turn on “Historical Imagery” pan to the region around Toronto, Canada, then move the slider all the way to the left and the imagery will show up as black and white areas, or simply download this KML file. There is also quite a lot of historical imagery from the Second World War in parts of Europe, with significant portions of the UK having imagery from 1945 or earlier.

It is important to note that although satellite imaging has many advantages, for the highest resolution aerial imagery, airplanes are still used today and most of the high resolution imagery in Google Earth was captured from aircraft.

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