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Hi Martin,

This time I’ll deal with the 1895 photo showing a large tunnel on the southern face.

You know, after 7 years, you’d think that I would have learnt all the “tricks” on Google Earth, but as I’d said, “If I can’t do something, I’ll keep thinking until I dream up some way of doing it”, and here is a great example:

After attempting to find the tunnel off the 1942 photo using Google Earth (the one the same as on page 290 in your book) and then stumbling on the fact that it was an illusion, I then thought I’d this time try to locate what was on the 1895 photo on page 141 and 142 to see if this was an illusion also.

What I needed to do was find some way of overlaying the 1895 photo over a present day photo to see if I could pinpoint the exact spot.

To cut a long story short, I found that if I worked out the exact spot the 1985 photo was taken from, I could then take a ‘snapshot’ of Google Earth of North Head in 3D, and after a lot of trial and error to get the right angle, this is what I got:

I then overlaid the original copy of the photo over the open sea, due to the sea being flat:

From there I overlaid the original copy of the 1895 photo over the top of it, and by incorporating the “fade function”, I was able to stretch it to near on the correct size:

NH Page 5

Tunnel enlarged

from photo on left