Google's New Toy

[Jenaroph]

I don’t know if anyone else remembers this, but MapQuest used to have the map/satellite swap feature. It wasn’t a fullscreen page, but it was generally closeup photos, and then they discontinued it a few years ago.

I could probably figure out when this was if I can remember the year we did some radical yardwork, 'cause we pinpointed when the satellite photo was taken because of certain trees that’d we’d removed.
The Google thing is cool. Photos of my area are dated '05, and I think I see my truck in front of my boyfriends house. :eek:

[Trunk]

@Offensive

Say, aren’t there are few… CONTINENTS missing? You can’t help but feel a little rejected.

You can get a satellite image of Europe, but not too zoomed in.

Here’s a picture. I think I centered “Interlaken, Switzerland” as best as I could.

[UncleRojelio]

If you want to map specific coordinates you can type them in the seatch field as decimal degrees. Or you can hack the URL thusly:

For maps:
<http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=30.3993,-97.6858>

For Satellites:
<http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=30.3993,-97.6858&t=k>

[Tupug_Anachi]

I’ve tried a few “points of interest” and got some kinda cool results. Kennedy Space Center, Florida and Niagara Falls, New York have good zoom.

[The_Weird_One]

Wow, that’s awesome. It pinpointed the house I grew up in, my old apartment in Baltimore, and my current house exactly.

[UncleRojelio]

Try Zooming in on this location:

Caught the USS Stennis (CVN-74) in port:

[Tapioca_Dextrin]

Google does look pretty sucky out of the US.

If you want something better (and you have the patience for a 200Mb download) navigate over to NASA World Wind which has pretty good worldwide coverage.

[Finagle]

Dang. I just looked up my old house on the Connecticut river and now I feel sad. I liked living there!

Pretty cool, though. They’ve apparently taken some new pictures of my current town since the last time I looked for satellite pics. I think they even have my gazebo in there. Oddly, the trees (big, old maples) don’t show up. Either the pics were taken during dead of winter or they were taken in some weird part of the spectrum.

Resolution is hit or miss, though. My current obscure suburb is down to individual houses, while my much larger hometown is just a blurry mess.

[Limbo_Donni]

This aerial site is vastly better. I can count the chaises longues around our pool, and tell which way they face.

http://www.mapmart.com/AerialPhotography/Aerial.htm

[Troy_McClure_SF]

@Limbo Donni

This aerial site is vastly better. I can count the chaises longues around our pool, and tell which way they face.

Route Planner

But you can’t see SBC Park, though they do have it labeled with a football.

[Troy_McClure_SF]

@Troy McClure SF

But you can’t see SBC Park, though they do have it labeled with a football.

Crap. I missed “color aerial.” You can make out the sections, but it’s pretty pixellated after that.

[pmwgreen]

For the UK, and some of Europe, check-out http://www.multimap.com. Not only does it have the aerial photo feature, but a combined mode where the road map is superimposed transparently over the satellite photo. Doesn’t have the click-and-drag that Google implemented though.

[squeegee]

@Giles

I haven’t checked on any military bases, but some photos are deliberately degraded for security reasons. Go look for “100 Independence Ave SE, Washington, DC 20003”, then try to zoom in on the large building to the north-west of there. You’ll find it pixellated to hide details (as with the office buildings to the north and south of it, but not with the Library of Congress buildings or the Supreme Court building, in the same neighbourhood).

The White House, and the buildings on either side, have their roofs obscured with a solid brown mask. Capital hill and it’s surrounding area is completely blurred out.

[NinjaChick]

Oh, cool. They got my house spot-on. I thought that they missed my college by about a half-mile, but on second look, the arrow is where the school’s property does start.

I <3 Google.

[Mangetout]

@Strinka

It’s picture of the world isn’t a satellite photo. You can see underwater features such as the mid-atlantic ridge. And then there’s that startling lack of clouds.

Dunno about the underwater features, but the lack of clouds is easy to explain; the image is a stitched mosaic anyway, so when you’re gathering the data, you make several exposures of each area, on different days, then you choose the ones that are best/clearest from the whole set and stitch those together

[Agrippina]

@Giles

I haven’t checked on any military bases, but some photos are deliberately degraded for security reasons. Go look for “100 Independence Ave SE, Washington, DC 20003”, then try to zoom in on the large building to the north-west of there. You’ll find it pixellated to hide details (as with the office buildings to the north and south of it, but not with the Library of Congress buildings or the Supreme Court building, in the same neighbourhood).

It’s odd they would have those locations blurred when it shows Area 51 just fine.

[squeegee]

@Agrippina

It’s odd they would have those locations blurred when it shows Area 51 just fine.

At a resolution a tenth or less of that show for the D.C. area. No need to obscure or blur anything at that resolution.

[rowrrbazzle]

Thanks for the heads-up! Google’s interface is wonderful. I note the Google images are watermarked.

At least in Chicago, Google is displaying the same data as MS Terraserver. Here’s the Museum of Science and Industry on Google and Terraserver. Note the U-505 on the right wing of the building. It was moved indoors some time ago. The Terraserver image says it’s from April 2005.

Another place to go for hi-res aerial photos is http://nationalmap.usgs.gov/index.html. The interface is complicated, but it also uses the same aerial data as Terraserver and you can download a hi-res TIFF of your selected area. It also has various layers like pmwgreen said about multimap, including streets and street names.

[rowrrbazzle]

That should be “April 2002”. :smack:

[scr4]

Thanks for the news, this is great stuff. My house (apartment building) is a few blocks off, but it’s not too bad.

One reason I like Google Maps is that it doesn’t have separate input boxes for street, city and state. So much easier to cut-and-paste addresses from another window. The only thing I don’t like is that it doesn’t display a distance scale, what’s up with that?