I use a fun website called Terraserver, which allows me to look down from a satellite, locate any area in the US, then zoom in (or down) to a couple of hundred feet of my target. The only problem is, the progam is all photographs that are a few years old and in black and white. It’s still fun, though, because I’ve located my town, found my home, found my old home, located an exgirlfriends home and examined the city from above.
Are there any real time interactive satellite websites around for public use?
There’s one proposed, but God and Congress willing, it won’t ever get off the ground. I can’t remember who’s backing it, but there’s a proposal to put a satellite at the Earth-Sun L1 point, so it’s always facing the daylit half of the Earth, and download a picture every five minutes for a website. This is stupid, for a number of reasons: First of all, you can get the exact same images from a collage of weather sattelite images. Secondly, it’s expensive to launch a satellite, especially to a Lagrange point. Thirdly, the Lagrange points are all prime real estate for various sattelites that have a legitimate reason to need to be there: SOHO, for instance, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, is already at the L1 point, so as to always be able to see the Sun. Fourthly, this satellite wouldn’t have any value whatsoever, other than feeding footage to a popular website.
Also note, by the way, that the proposed satellite would not be interactive, it’d just show pictures of the entire daylit side, no zoomig, no further aiming. An interactive spy sattelite (the TerraServer images are mostly from declassified Russian spy footage) would be enormously expensive, and it’d only be able to aim in one direction at a time: What if a few thousand people all wanted to see their home at once?