Google Earth question

General Questions
#1

Don’t know why it took me so long, but finally got around to downloading Google Earth 4.0.1565 beta ver. Way cool!

I’ve noticed that in major cities, you can zoom in so close you can see cars and even pedestrians. In more rural or remote areas, or smaller towns, zooming in to house level shows very fuzzy images.

  1. Is that a matter of me not having a good enough graphics card, or is it that the images are just not that good?

  2. My daughter lives just outside a small town in Colorado. The community buildings are shown (albeit fuzzy), but where her house should be, there’s nothing. The house was built about 10 years ago. Still to be scanned?

  3. How the heck did they get images of the entire earth (mostly)? Are they all satellite images, or some aerial photography?

#2

They tend to have better photographs of some areas.

#3

And dang it, they’ve changed photos of my place pf business.
My car is no longer there!

#4

There’s plenty of out-of-date images, and not just in remote areas. Sports stadiums are easy ones to find. The old Wembley Stadium in London is still visible, although it was demolished three years ago. Search for ‘M11 3FF’ and you’ll see the foundations of the City of Manchester stadium, which was used in the 2002 Commonwealth Games.

#5

The really really hi-res stuff is usually aerial photography. The blurrier stuff is from one of various satellites - there just aren’t hi-res aerial photographs of most of the world, nor are the people with the highest quality satellite imagery (i.e., military and intelligence organizations) all that keen on sharing everything they have. Your video card has nothing to do with it.