Studying satellite pictures sometimes reveals interesting
patterns. Some are man made, others are not.
The picture below shows the symmetry of a gated
community.
Browsing for possible cache locations (running out of lamp
posts) in Santa Clara I came across the following structure:
What looks like a gigantic bone must be some sort of race track?
Laguna Seca here in Santa Clara?
I tried hiding a cache on the premises, but there is no public
access. The whole facility is out of sight and close by you will
find a very impressive arsenal of ground weaponry.
So I opted for a more traditional hide for a 35mm film can, not
too far away. The exact location is shown below.
Finding the bone (which
is more or less within city limits of Santa Clara) shouldn't
be much of a challenge if you use terraserver for example.
Zoom in to Santa Clara and look around for the structure. The
parking lot is close by, and the cache is hidden within meters
of an American landmark which can not be missed.
If you insist on using the GPS for this cache, the info
button (in terraserver) provides you with a crosshair. Click on
the right spot and you will see coordinates for the cache at the
sides of the image. You can use boulter's excellent GPS Coordinate Converter to convert
the Decimal Degrees (WGS84) to the format you are more used to. Or,
you can try finding the cache without a GPS! I bet there are a few
cachers who won't even need to look at any satellite pictures.
Extra points for figuring out what kind of vehicles normally
race here.
The terraserver is an impressive effort to store data on
products sold by a certain company in Redmond, WA. Recently several
urban areas have been updated with images taken in 2004. The
resolution of .25m allows you to see people and possibly even your
car in the driveway. My favorite is
here (low res). An image you can find every Wednesday on your
TV in more detail has been blacked out - "
The West Wing"
EDIT 01/22/05: Marky shared the following:Some people might find
my terraserver viewer easier to use.
Plus, when you click to recenter the map, it will display the
coords. (Note: The formula for calculating the coordinates of where
you clicked is just a rough estimate)