Don Terrill’s Speed-Talk

I just checked Hawaii and Pearl Harbor. Zooming in I still see all the underwater mountain range in the Pacific and the sunken ships in the harbor at Ford Island.

You were probably wearing your tin foil hat Dave. This needs to be moved over to the political side.

Huh? WW2 didn't happen?

I just looked up Tahiti on Google maps as I wanted to see Marlon Brando's island where Obama is. No problem seeing the atoll and blue water.

exhaustgases wrote:I want to see the surface of the water not ocean floor maps. I want to see ships and what ever else is out there.

you need a bigger monitor and zoom. It's a big ocean. Trying to find a container ship might be daunting. Heck, any of the islands like Iwo don't even show up until you zoom way in.
And it's not live. Some images are years old.

If you want to see something of the old space race look on google earth. 45deg 42' 20.86" N - 63 deg 20' 16.07" E north of Baikonur Kazakhstan
This is the Russian's main space port.
It looks like a junk yard.
It looked like a junkyard when Google first took pictures of it. They don't have to deal with the EPA and when one blew up on the pad they just built another pad.
Russia is building a new one in Siberia.
First time I was looking at it I had thought of Gary Francis Powers being shot down in his U-2 taking pictures of it.
Now we sit in our living room looking at the Russian Space Port.
By the way: nearby is a large runway they landed their remote control space shuttle on. They never manned theirs like we did.

I was looking at Mosul one day. Years old images though.
You would think via the TV that is was a moderately sized small town.
Nope...it is or was a full blown city.

Go to the following coordinates and see the shipwreck floating on the ocean, with oil spill visible and everything.


19 38'45.99"N 37 17'42.17E

Blue shield? Ocean floor? Huh?? Satellites can't see through the ocean to the ocean floor. Maybe on the beach where the water isn't very deep but not out in the middle of nowhere. You're not looking at a blue shield or the ocean floor a mile down with zero light. From anywhere between 100-36000km above the surface of the earth. That's ludicrous.

Take a globe. Turn it until it's mostly blue; the Pacific Ocean spans half the world.

Look a bit down and to the right of center, at 27.1130° S, 109.3496° W. That's Rapa Nui, known as Easter Island in English.

Around the island are giant stone statues, the moai. The islanders carved them from stone 500 to 700 years ago and set them up along the shoreline. Nobody remembers why.

Zoom in. There's a long white line on the island. It is an enormous concrete runway. It is so large that only part of it is in use, for what airports a tiny island needs.

The runway was built by NASA. It was an emergency landing site for the space shuttle.

Given that Roman concrete is still just fine, the runway at Rapa Nui might outlast the moai. And while we don't have space travel any more, our gum wrappers and junk cars still litter the Moon, our rovers still crawl around on Mars, and Voyager 1 is 138 A.U. out, 39 years after launch. In 40,000 years it will pass near the star Gliese 445, 17.6 light-years away.

And among the items in its non-instrument payload is a recording of Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode"...