Indiana is the only place in the world that has the city quality resolution of photos of the country side. You can clearly see the difference between Indiana and the surrounding states. Why is it that seemingly every square inch of Indiana has high resolution photos?
I couldn’t see it before because of inclement weather, but I can see clearly now the rain is gone…
In all seriousness, does Indiana have something that would cause it to be carefully surveyed? Such as a higher concentration of military bases or transportation infrastructure?
There are other places in Google Earth that have high resolution images outside city areas. The King Sound, in the north-west of Australia is one.
Hm. So maybe they’re slowly replacing all the old low-res images with better ones, one state (or province or area) at a time? Just a WAG, but it might make sense. And then, you know… Indiana just somehow got done before a bunch of others.
I think they have loaded the database with the best quality pics they can get for a reasonable price, and spent a bit extra over major cities. Or it may be that more pics are taken of cities so they are cheaper. Scanning over it ofr the first time at the weekend (WOW it’s cool!) I noticed that some areas are low, quality, some are high-quality. Some areas even have bits of cloud cover over them. Pot luck.
My guess is that as 1m resolution pictures become more available and cheaper, we’ll get an upgrade.
Maybe maybe someone has done an aerial survey of indiana lately, or a lot of pics are taken because of farming or something? That might make high-quality pics available for cheap. It’s not that a special survey has been done, because you should be able to get high-res coverage of almost anywhere in the western world, down below a metre for aerial as opposed to sattelite pics.
The higher resolution photos come from many different sources. For urban areas in New York state, the high-resolution photos are much sharper than those for other urban areas; the source of those photos is the state government. This may also be the case with Indiana. Perhaps the state allowed use of high-resolution satellite photos they commissioned for a very low royalty, or even allow their use for free.
Indiana is not alone in this; Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Missouri are also completely covered by the high-res images.
I’ve always assumed that the governments of those states have provided the images (in fact it explicitly says so for Massachusetts and New Jersey). I’ve also assumed that for many if not most of the other states, high-resolution images do not even exist for the whole state. Or maybe Google just hasn’t managed to get them.
Indeed. If you just take a look at the continent-level zoom, you’ll see Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Indiana showing up quite distinctly, due to the different set of imagery used for those states.