Friday, June 1, 2012

29 May Imagery Update

First, some housekeeping.  Given that this is the first serious attempt at documenting anything interesting in the most recent Google Earth imagery update, here's how it will work.  The post title will have the date of the imagery update as displayed in the Google Earth imagery update kml file.  So don't be confused when today is 1 June and you see the post title with 29 May!  Also, I've tagged the post with the Google Earth label, and created a new one called Imagery Update.  From this point forward if you find the Imagery Update tag in the label list, you can then view all of the relevant articles talking about Google Earth's imagery updates.

Also, I'm not going to detail every little thing or every updated location.  If you want that, head over to the Google Earth Blog.  They do a great job of both announcing updates and listing locations as they're discovered.  This will serve to highlight some of the amusing new imagery, or maybe amusing updated imagery, of places of interest to myself and readers of this site.

On to the update.  The Google Earth imagery update on the 29th was pretty impressive.  Lots of new imagery incorporated, mostly a bunch of smaller cels. 

One new location now visible in high resolution is the Nenoksa SLBM test complex west of Severodvinsk.  Which sounds like a really great place for an I&A Facility Overview!

There's new imagery of a lot of the PLA's 830th Brigade complexes at Kunming, but nothing earth-shattering to report.

May 2011 historical imagery of the southwestern 53T6 ABM site around Moscow shows some sort of work at one of the silos, and there's a GAZELLE transloader parked in the vehicle area.

In terms of the SAM Site Overview file, an interesting development is the deployment of a 55Zh6 TALL RACK CVLO VHF-band radar north of Orsha in Belarus.  This makes two of the systems identified in Belarus at this time.

The most irritating update is a block of new imagery from late 2011 in Baku, Azerbaijan...which is still of no help as to locating their S-300PMU-2 components.

Those are the most interesting or significant things I've noticed so far exploring the new imagery.  If I locate anything else, I'll update this post and kick it back to the top of the page.

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