Writing on the Wall

Lisbon, Portugal

After I put this puzzle together I wondered if I could get a similar view from Google Maps. It was a little difficult, but I eventually found the square that is illuminated in the foreground and the row of buildings along the side:

Praca Martim Moniz

The perspective is different. There might be a way to adjust the 3D view so it more closely matches the image, but this was close enough for me. The top image was probably taken from Miradouro da Senhora do Monte, a popular viewpoint. You can see a similar images taken from this viewpoint here.

But what's that tower on the far shore? You can see it just to the right of left most tower of the 25 de Abril Bridge. You can also see it in the Google Maps image about. However, the left most tower of the suspension bridge has disappeared from view. There just aren't enough pixels to display something that spindly that far away. It's like three miles from the camera.

There is a big tower on the south shore, but it isn't in the frame, so what is that thing. More poking around turns up this water tower:

Water Resevoir, Monte de Caparica

We're looking back across the river, back towards where the first image was taken. My question is: how did they pick up the signage on the side of this tower? Satellites can give you an image of the buildings and land, but they are pretty much looking straight down. Never mind the claims that NSA (National Security Agency) can read license plates (they can't). You can look a little bit sideways, but for every bit off of vertical you are adding miles to your distance which is going to make it even harder to see.

Google, or somebody, is using LIDAR to map some parts of the world in detail, which is how we get images like this (and this). But paint is not going to be picked up by LIDAR, is it? I dunno, maybe it can. Google has a patent on it.

Google Maps wasn't any help identifying this thing. I mean it could be some old industrial structure, so I went over to Wikimapia, which has a selection of views to choose from and one of them is OSM, which is where I found out what it is.

OSM is Open Street Map. Okay, but isn't that what Wikimapia is? Um, not exactly. Wikipedia explains:

Wikimapia was created in Russia by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev in May 2006. The data, a crowdsourced collection of places marked by registered users and guests, has grown to just under 28,000,000 objects as of November 2017, and is released under the Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA). Although the project's name is reminiscent of that of Wikipedia, and the creators share parts of the "wiki" philosophy, it is not a part of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation family of wikis.