OSINT Exercise 002 from Sofia Santos.

In this post i will solve OSINT exercise 002 from Sofia Santos, i have solved exercise 001 in a previous post. Check her website at https://gralhix.com/

The exercise:

The photo below was shared on social media. It clearly depicts a train station.

Please answer the following questions:

a) What is the name of the train station seen in the photo?

b) What is the name and height of the tallest structure seen in the photo?

Solution:

Searching Flinders Street Station on google leads to a train station in Melbourne Australia, a quick look around on the google street view and its easy to spot the same buildings in the photograph.

As we can observe the buildings in the google street view match the buildings in the picture (with one exception), this is enough to confirm that indeed the picture was taken in Flinders Street Station in Melbourne Australia facing south.

We solved objetive A, now to find the height of the tallest structure.

In google street view there is a building missing that shows in the picture.

The building in question shows up on google earth pro, its the FOCUS Apartments by Central Equity, it was inaugurated in 2023, as the picture in google maps is from 2018 it was still in construction.

Since we know the name of all the buildings a quick google search can give us their height.

The other two buildings without height are visibly smaller than the IBM Australia building, this leads us to conclude that the tallest building is the Focus Apartments with 166m.

The height of both the Focus Apartments and IBM building was obtained in https://www.skyscrapercenter.com/ , the height of the Langham was obtained trough its Wikipedia page, but even if inaccurate its still visibly smaller than the others.

But the challenge said tallest structure and we can just about see a tower like structure on the left side.

That structure is the Melbourne arts centre and a quick google search reveals that its 162m tall, therefore our tallest structure is still the Focus Apartments.

Answer a) Flinders Street Station.

Answer b) Focus Apartments with 166m.