Matt’s Wikimapia Blog

Here are the beautiful rolling hills of Italy. And what is that there 1600m up Colletto Fava? Oh yes, it is a giant rabbit!

The installed art project called Hase (which means Rabbit) was created by artist gelitin and was opened in 2005 and will remain in place for visitors to rest upon and climb until 2025. For more info on this … interesting? bizarre? clever? whatever you want to call it, see the project page here. You can also visit the location at Wikimapia!

The Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in Ranier, Oregon has been completely decommissioned as of April of 2005 and its large cooling tower was demolished in May of 2006. The demolition of the cooling tower was a pretty big event that drew a large audience.

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I caught Megabuilders on Discovery Channel the other day titled “Quake-Proofing and Icon” about the construction of the new eastern span replacement of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. I thought it was pretty interesting and thought I would check it out at Wikimapia. (Images are clickable for larger versions.)

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The Forbidden City is really interesting I think. Right in the heart of Beijing, China, the Forbidden City houses the ancient imperial palace of the Ming and Qing dynasties (built 1406-1420).

For this installment of Matt’s Wikimapia Blog’s Fun Places I will be using the Wikimapia layer in Google Earth for a slightly different vantage than the normal Wkimapia view. Click the images for the larger versions (which are really helpful for this post).

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I have a feeling a lot of Wikimapia and Google Earth users have visited the Egyptian Pyramids before, but I still think they are interesting and I am sure there are still many that haven’t seen them. I have also added a more modern version of the pyramids at the end of the post. (Images are clickable for larger versions.)

The Egyptian city of Cairo is in the northeast (upper right) corner of this image with the Giza pyramid complex residing in the southwestern (lower left) outskirts.

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Astronomy is definitely a passion of mine so I think telescopes are pretty cool, especially big ones. The biggest telescope out there is the 305m radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory. Because radio waves are larger than optical waves, the surface of the antenna does not have to be as smooth allowing the telescope to be built much larger. The dish of Arecibo is made of some 40,000 perforated aluminum panels. Here is a nice diagram of how Arecibo works.

The Arecibo Observatory is often used for SETI projects (among many other scientific research projects) and is also highly recognizable because it has been used in Contact by Ellie (the lead character) and as part of the villain’s evil plan in James Bond’s GoldenEye. Large telescopes often look fairly interesting from satellite imagery as well. Wikimapia has been used to mark a number of those telescopes to provide us with information about them. I will start with Arecibo and move on to a four large optical telescopes and two additional radio telescopes. Clicking an image will either take you to a larger image or to the location at Wikimapia.

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