LAX is pretty easy to spot as a whiter spot within the gray spot that is the Los Angeles Basin. Granted that’s mostly the runway and not the terminal buildings. Looks like Denver was clouded over, otherwise Denver’s airport would have likely been easy to spot too. I believe any single isolated building is going to be a bridge too far at this resolution.
I can easily see the urban sprawl of San Jose (and the rest of the Bay Area) as well as L.A. and New Orleans.
I think you are out of luck. We have a fairly straight on and unobstructed view on New Orleans. If we could see something like a stadium, I would expect the Superdome would be it. But no such luck. As it is I can make out some neighborhoods Elmwood (still in New Orleans) for example has more large buildings and evidently they like white roofs. It comes out as a smudge 4 pixels by 4 pixels.
If you want to make out a single structure, you’ll want one that will be at least 2 miles on a side that will also contrast a lot with the surrounding area. I can’t think of any off hand. Maybe a large airport? I think the smudge to the northwest of Elmwood in NO is likely the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. Likewise I think I can see LAX and the Port of Long Beach in LA straight down from it. But all of those are complexes rather than structures.
Which image are we supposed to be looking at? This one? Some other one?
I guess this one instead, since it’s 16.4 MBytes. The other one is only 6.1 MB, although both are 8k by 8k.
The bridge over Lake Ponchartrain, just north of New Orleans, is visible.
I see clouds where San Jose is.
As for the OP, Look for the causeway on Lake Ponchartrain. It’s over to the right.
Once you know where the urban sprawl is, it’s easy to locate by its grayish color. But you can’t see individual buildings.
Sigh. Well I did a search, and if I’d spelled it correctly, I’d have seen that it was already mentioned…
I will point out that I’d count a bridge as a “structure”.
Yeah, your larger image has clearer details than the one I was looking at. I thought you all were using wishful thinking. So it looks like 100’ wide is sufficient, as long as the structure contrasts significantly vs the backdrop (white vs green/blue in this case). I don’t see any other 100’ wide structures that are so lucky. It looks like near NO a pixel is about a 2000’ or so on a side. So the Superdome disappears into the whitish blur that is the central business district.
Even the causeway really shouldn’t be visible at this resolution, but it contrasts sufficiently with the water to lighten those pixels in comparison to the pure water. Those pixels with the causeway are actually about 95% water and 5% causeway, by my estimate. Still it counts, at least as far as I’m concerned.
I can see the Cape Cod Canal, but so much of the northeast is clouded in I can’t look for much else I’d expect to recognize.
There’s remarkable color contrast marking the route of the Ogden Cutoff across the Great Salt Lake. And south of the lake, stretching west into the salt flats, you can make out I-80. Because there’s no “strip of development” through there, only the highway, I’m inclined to count it.
If you know where to look (based on Grapevine Lake pointing to it), you can also distinguish Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport. And LAX is 16 pixels unlike those around it.
The details in Mexico and Central America, being nearly directly under the satellite while these images were acquired (at least, the way they were mapped onto the globe), seem to be about 100 feet or so to a side per pixel. Toward the periphery, where foreshortening is worse, the images measure around 500-1000 feet (or more) to a side per pixel, rendering a lot of “structures” as blurry smudges against a slightly different color background.
I think your calculations are off. I checked a portion of Mexico that is ~560 miles wide, and it corresponded to ~1250 pixels. Based on that, an individual pixel would correspond to an area around 2350 ft x 2350 ft.
As a frame of reference, a large football stadium is generally around 1000 ft long. So even if it were at the center of the image, a stadium would probably only make up less than 1/4 of a pixel. Assuming something would need to be at least 2x2 pixels to be recognizable, you’d need anything to be 16-20x the size of a large football stadium to be visible.
Try as I might, I couldn’t find the gigantic soundstage where they film The Truman Show.