Smile For The Satellite
Chelyabinsk is one happy town. They’ve come a long way from being "the most contaminated spot on the planet."
Here’s an interesting story from Slashdot:
Citizens of the Russian town Chelyabinsk calculated when the satellite, QuickBird, which takes images for Google Earth and Google Maps, would cross above their city and used people to make a giant smiley face. A rock concert on the main square attracted many people and everyone got a yellow cape. It looks like someone at Google was quicker than usual to put up the new data. Maybe Google likes the idea of an entire town working hard to get its 15 minutes of fame. The article has a screenshot of Google Maps and images taken directly at the event."
They did pretty good:
This isn’t the first time that Google Earth or Google Maps has captured something interesting from space. Longtime readers of Really Rocket Science will recall the Ipod that fell to Earth, which we wrote about way back in March of 2006:
But there’s more to be seen than "Ipods" and smiley faces in the world of Google Earth. GoogleSightSeeing.com — whose tag line is "Why Bother Seeing the World for Real?" has a great series of blog posts on cool sights that you can see right from your computer desk. Be sure to check out this map of global points of interest.
Here’s a clip on Chelyabinsk:
