Google Maps gets satellite imagery
And it works just like the rest of the service. Zooming in, it appears to be 1m resolution and I see a couple dots that look like people. While this ability has been there with other services, integration with Maps makes it very pleasant to use. They’ve also incorporated world-wide imagery, but it’s not detailed.
UPDATE: I tried looking up the University of Illinois library in Urbana, but they don’t have any high res imagery. Also, the images of my city are at least two years old and, therefore, don’t include a lot of new construction.
April 14th, 2005 at 7:45 pm
While I love Google like it was my own child, the satellite images they have need more work. In the meantime I would check out Terra Server-USA. They only have an old black and white image of Urbana (so no good library shots), but they have some incredible color, zoom shots of many of the urban areas, even Evanston. It also allows you to adjust the screen size and even “Save Image As” so you can make your wallpaper for your desktop a nice view of O’Hare and if you want you can zoom in so far you can see if they are serving those delicious, buttery mini-pretzels on the flight. I was even able to find my house in Hastings, NE. It is an incredibly tiny town so if I can zoom that close to make out my home there, it’s a pretty good site. The find an address feature is not that sharp though. It tends to tag things about 3 blocks from the actual address, but still a fun hour or two of time-killing. Check it out.
April 14th, 2005 at 7:49 pm
Minor correction to my last statement. The only way you can save the image is if you zoom in to the maximum zoom. The images are a patchwork of smaller images so until you get into a single image, you can’t save it all. Sorry.
April 14th, 2005 at 11:26 pm
Wow, Hastings is small! :-)
Also, I looked closely at the Google and TerraServer shot of NU and it turns out that they are the same images, although TerraServer lets you go to a much higher resolution.