Google Earth and Google Satellite have updated their satellite photos of Ajijic, where I live. It shows my house, and the new (2-year-old) house below me, and an even newer house to the East of me.

So I moved the view to downtown to look around... and there are areas that look like they might have looked 70 years ago. The largest, most impressive structure in town, the church and it's 80-foot tower, are gone, replaced by a near-empty lot. The downtown plaza shows only the gazebo surrounded by trees instead of all the buildings surrounding it.

That church and plaza have been in place for longer than there have even been satellites.

How can this be?

tanstaafl.

The satellites are taking pictures 6 years in the future.

Possibilities:
- The photo reference sources are not from satellites, but from airplanes, so they are from an era older than you'd expect.
- The photo sources are simply wrong; some kind of location misalignment, or photos from a completely different city.

Unlikely. One of the missing buildings dates back to before the Wright Brothers. Hell, it dates back to before Matthew Brady. Also, the clarity and resolution of the picture(s) of my house and the anomalous downtown area (less than a kilometer apart) are absolutely identical with no discernible stitching or variations that could indicate different sources, and about five kilometers further away in the uninhabited mountains there are cumulus clouds seen from a considerable distance above them.

Not possible. Ajijic is a small village and I know it well. You could give me a blind test, show me a picture of the blocks with the missing buildings and I would point out to you "There is Bancomer, there is that big warehouse I've never been able to figure out what it is for... but where is the church tower, there's the plaza but why is it all full of trees?"

It is a puzzlement.

tanstaafl.

Must be a secret military or drug cartel installation there then.

Google links or screen shots would be interesting. I know you wouldn't want to post your address on an internet forum, but a link to, say, a general neighborhood nearby where you know the satellite photo is accurate would be interesting, and then a link to the anomalous part.

By the way, I see some pretty obvious seams when I look at Google satellite pictures of the general area around Ajijic:

Another possibility:
- As you went scrolling around the satellite map, you got lost. For instance, the location that you think should contain a church isn't the location you think it is.

Okay, you asked for it.

The first photo is one I took from my deck this afternoon. As a location reference, look at the long warehouse pointed out by the red text. Note the somewhat prominent church and tower slightly South and East of the warehouse.

The other picture is from Google Satellite. Somewhere near the top of the picture is my house. Near the bottom towards the right is the church. Trust me when I say with absolute certainty that the lot the church is on abuts the intersection of Castellanos and Parroquia streets.

To locate the church on the Google picture, start at the top middle of the picture, and go down Colon street until you reach Parroquia. Go East on Parroquia until it ends at the middle of the church lot.

I am more than passingly familiar with every street and building in this picture, and can readily identify a few anomalies, like the street Guadalupe Victoria being labeled as continuing between Castellanos and Colon streets but as the picture shows, it ends at Castellanos.

However... I THINK I have identified the source of my confusion re: the missing church bell tower. If you download the Google picture and zoom in on the church lot, you can see the small clock tower at the front center of the long, narrow building on the church lot. That is the actual church. In the photograph I took, the clock tower appears to be in front of the large bell tower, but actually they are offset, the bell tower is set back and located North of the clock tower. Now, if you look very closely at the Google picture, you will see a smudged something back and North of the clock tower.

Is it possible that the satellite was absolutely perfectly overhead when the photo was taken, and the bell tower is so foreshortened that it sinks into near invisibility? In the plaza, did I mistake bushes for foreshortened trees? At the Northwest corner of the plaza, does the icon and text describing the "Ajijic Little Church" so cover the actual building that it is no longer visible?

I'm guessing the answer is yes to all three of these questions.

tanstaafl.

I'm not sure what you include as "general area"... but that is NOT Ajijic! That is Chapala, about six miles East, and about six times the size.

Ajijic is nice. Chapala is yucky.

tanstaafl.

The chance of that is... zero. Ajijic is quite a small little village, and the landmarks are quite distinctive. I walk or bike everywhere in Ajijic, to the point where I am familiar even with the individual potholes in the cobblestone streets. The aerial views only reinforce what I already know.

tanstaafl.

Not only is the satellite (or plane) very nearly overhead in that Google Maps picture, but so is the sun: almost nothing casts a shadow more than a pixel or two wide. You never see that at UK latitudes, of course, and the effect is to make the whole town look steamrollered flat. The only obvious exception is -- a structure at the northwest corner of the church which seems to cast quite a substantial shadow. That'll be the bell-tower, then.

Peter

Are you aware that you can turn off the labels on Google Maps or Earth, thus exposing the little church? In Google Maps, if you hover over the "Map" icon in the upper right it expands to some additional options, one of which is "Labels". Uncheck that and it clears up. In the standalone Earth client, there's something similar in the lower left.

I was aware that it could be done... I just wasn't smart enough to figure out how.

Thanks for that!

tanstaafl.