For all I know with MikeD “something very bad” could be Sander ate the last cupcake here.

I maintain that Tyler and Patrick are just full of knowledge of how things look from the sky.

Arrrrgh….

Scale got me. As in, I was looking in exactly the right place but I was looking for something 10 times smaller. I wasn’t zoomed out enough to see the bigger picture.

Here’s what I did: I didn’t recognize it immediately, but I determined that it wasn’t in the USA, Canada, Australia, and northern Europe. Other than knowing that it was from a non-volcanic, mountainous, and non-tropical area, I knew I’d have to manually search for it, so I wanted some clues.

The first clue was that the bird’s eye view is facing east, so it’d be from a peninsula/bay with an ocean/sea to the south and west. This gave me the possibilities of western coasts of Mexico and South America, Africa, and the eastern coasts of the Adriatic, Red, and Aegean Seas, and the Persian Gulf.

The second clue was that it was in a region with Google Maps with English letters (yellow text in the inset map). This eliminated the Middle East, and all probable locations in the Western Hemisphere.

And the third clue was that the original image was zoomed to the 4th-closest level, and this could give me a sense of scale. Using the scale, I estimated the visible length of the peninsula in the first image to be about 3000 feet. Then, knowing that the first image was within the red circle, the red circle must also be 3000 feet in diameter. Therefore, I was looking for a peninsula of about 1.5 miles long, and a bay of about 1.5 miles in diameter.

Then I tried to figure out what feature Mike D. intended to use, but missed. My first guess was Gibraltar, and that Mike D had missed to the south and found something in Morocco. Once I got to Morocco, I got excited, because there were mountains and maps. However, I didn’t find anything. However, I still had a hunch that it was Africa, with lots of favorable coastlines, plus Google Maps. I skipped down to southern Angola (maybe the significance was the origin of Bradgelina’s baby) and worked my way around Cape Horn, and then checked out the western coast of Madagascar. Keep in mind, I did all of this zoomed in too far, and I completely went RIGHT THROUGH the correct answer.

The sad part is that somehow, subconsciously, I knew it was there, because I checked the Cape Town area TWICE, still zoomed in. I knew I was close, but, well, I didn’t know that I was that close! My mistake? Assuming that the red circle was the same size as the original image. So, yeah, arrrrrgh….. Congrats to the trio who solved it!

Re: This week’s skyline

Becky is right on with everything. What’s funny, is that I took that exact same picture again on Thursday. The National WWI Museum just opened a month ago at the Liberty Memorial, so my family and I went to check it out last week. (It’s an amazing museum, by the way). Anyway, our entry fee included a trip to the top of the tower, so I went up there again and took another photo (this one was taken April 2004). While I was up there, I thought… “hmmmm, Mike D still hasn’t posted my skyline photo.” There’s been some activity in that panorama in the past few years. The Sprint Center (sports arena) is about half done, and they just broke ground on the new performing arts center, too.

Re: This week’s satellite photo

I have a guess as to what it is, but I’m not sure where it is. (I’m still in the preliminary stages on this one).

So much for “harder than Hartford.”

I have no idea on the satellite, but it looks like a circuit board.