There are no cars on the road in the images of the George Washington Bridge nor any of the highways or streets in and around New York City. Google removes them from the photos so all you see is street.
Most of Google Maps’ “satellite” view isn’t actual satellite imagery; it’s aerial photographs, i.e., taken from planes. There is some actual satellite imagery as well, but as I understand it, for urban areas they rely mostly on planes.
I have to say I’ve learned a lot in this thread - very interesting stuff!
I can see plenty of cars in the shots of NYC, but the bridges are clear. Looks the bridge shots or more overlayed so you can see some “ghost” cars.
From what I can tell, parked cars are visible but ones in the driving lanes aren’t. They probably use some software that removes moving objects but leaves the stationary ones.
Okay, I’ll ask and look like an idiot. Why does it look like an infrared shot of the bomber superimposed on a regular photo? As said above, it’s not made to be stealthy to cameras, there are countless pics of them flying around. Why is this one different?
Some/all of the cameras used for this kind of high resolution imagery take multiple exposures to assemble an image. In the case of that particular bomber, it took separate frames for the red, green and blue components, and the resulting misregistration is a product of how far the bomber moved between different parts of the capture. The camera or the post processing software aligns the three color frames assuming the target of the camera is static. It could easily have made the bomber one single, aligned color image, but then the entire rest of the image would have looked out of register.
eta: If you zoom in on the wingtip, you can clearly see the red image was taken first, then the bomber moved a bit before the blue image, then finally the green image was taken.
How about a space capsule in Oklahoma?
Well, you see it’s actually a formation flight: 3 Stealth bombers.
Thank you, I had no idea it was done that way. Amazing what you can learn here when you ask questions!
The 3D imagery Google uses (at least in major metropolitan areas) is constructed from multiple passes by airplanes at all sorts of different angles. That’s how they’re able to generated not-too-shabby 3D models of entire cities, with the trees and power lines and parked cars and all. It’s not that they’re specifically trying to remove moving vehicles, the very nature of the process doesn’t allow them to be captured in the first place. Essentially they’re averaged out, but it’s certainly not flawless. You can seem some ghost vehicles here for instance: Google Maps
That makes SOOOO much sense! Thank you!
All this time, I had really thought they were removing the cars deliberately. Butit turns out that the cars came out by default - it would have been more difficult to keep them in!
Airplanes? Really? I think “Google Drones” would be much more likely. Some pictures are far too impossibly detailed to have been taken by airplane. For example, go to any big city, look at any tall building horizontally at the tenth floor level. Or the incredible detail of the ductwork in the tooftop A/C units, and you can see it from any angle at all.
They’re definitely airplanes. Not Boeing 777s but Cessnas and other small planes that can fly relatively low over a city.
There are no drones that could legally and economically acquire such imagery over an entire city. The FAA still has very strict limitations about drone operations over populated areas and for commercial purposes. Yes, such drones exist, but they cannot be operated in most airspace in the US, particularly over major downtown areas.
While browsing Google Maps regarding the thread about the SS United Staes I stumbled across this image of a plane over the Philadelphia Navy Yard on approach to PHL airport.
In the Minneapolis St. Paul airport. In the southwest terminal, due south of the Cibo Food Hall marker and MinniBar, someone forgot their wing when they took off.
Definitely an effort to remove aircraft.
That picture reminds me of when a KC135 exploded at the Milwaukee airport in 1993. All day long TV news just had a camera showing an airplane-sized black smudge on the concrete. No leftover wing, though…
I followed the link to Google Maps a couple of times and don’t see a single or even triple-image (color separations) of any aircraft, and different zoom levels.
You think they updated their image to remove the airplane?
Haha yeah it does look like they removed it, but here’s what it looked like: https://petapixel.com/2021/12/28/stealth-bomber-caught-mid-flight-in-a-google-maps-photo/
Noice. Thanks!