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June 15, 2004
See Yourself in a Satellite Photograph!
A friend of mine sent this to me last night, and it completely amazed me. It's simultaneously incredibly cool, and a little spooky. Microsoft has a service called TerraServer USA which is "one of the world's largest online databases, providing free public access to a vast data store of maps and aerial photographs of the United States." That description doesn't do it justice, though. You really need to check it out.
You can drill down from a map of the world, right your your neighborhood (though only if you live in the US), or you can make things easy on yourself by entering your address and being taken directly to the spot. You can also browse famous places, and even incorporate TerraServer USA into your own applications via Microsoft's web service.
Ok, so now for some cool locations. This is the neighborhood I used to live in. The white car closest to the bottom of the photograph is the Nissan Sentra I recently sold, and the black car above it is my wife's old VW Passat. Spooky! Glad I wasn't doing anything suspicious outside that day.
This is the neighborhood I live in now the year before I moved in. My house is the end-unit on the left (below center), in case you want to drop a bomb on it or something. I can actually see my deck, and three hallway windows! Fortunately, you can't see how badly the deck needs to be refinished.
Here's another house I lived in as I was growing up (left of center). As you can see, it's much bigger than what I live in now. The economy has certainly changed around here!
Posted by cantrell at June 15, 2004 12:09 PM
Comments
With the web service, maybe it would be possible to incorporate into Flash and you could make something very cool scenes similar to the load screens on Full Spectrum Warrior(Xbox)!
Posted by: Paul Arce at June 15, 2004 12:40 PM
I met a guy at CFUN last year named Critter (he legally changed it) who has showed me an application that uses satallite data in connection with real estate data. I have no idea how he did it, but i was blown away. As I recall he said a single satallite image is 20 gigs.
Posted by: Steve Nelson at June 15, 2004 1:08 PM
Try looking to see if your county or city assessor has a public website. Clark County Nevada (my county) keeps pretty high res aerials (~3 feet per pixel) that I can see people laying out in back yard. It's not very clear, but you can tell a person from a bench or a log. We are looking at getting 6 inch resolution... now that should be cool! Just as an example, here's my house: http://gisgate.co.clark.nv.us/openweb/asp/openweb.asp?getParcel=17636320053
Posted by: Erik Madsen at June 15, 2004 1:08 PM
if you like this type of imagery, and you don't mind registering for the free 7 day trial, the Keyhole LT app at keyhole.com takes this type data (satellite imagery) to new levels. full color images, animates flying in and out of cities, pseudo-3D elevations, and the resolution is sometimes down to 1 foot!
a more interactive spooky tool that i love to play with :-)
cheers
g.
Posted by: g.wygonik at June 15, 2004 1:14 PM
The impressive is not the service itself, but the fact that Terra Server stores all images in a SQL Server database... Pretty large one you can bet.
Posted by: Alex Hubner at June 15, 2004 1:44 PM
I found that TerraServer often had BW images and that the dates were quite old. For example, here's Emerson field near where I live in Concord Massachusetts:
Most Recent: 1995
http://terraserver.microsoft.com/image.aspx?t=1&s=10&x=1533&y=23514&z=19&w=2
I prefer Globe Explorer where the same area is typically in color and I can immediately purchase and download a hi-res jpg or order a print. Here's the same image from Globe Explorer. Now the image does have the annoying watermark, but it is more recent and in color. The track was rebuilt between the time the Terraserver (1995) and GlobeExplorer (2001) photos were taken.
http://imageatlas.globexplorer.com/ImageAtlas/view.do?group=ImageAtlas
Just last week I purchased an aeriel photo from them for $35, and download the hi-res photo immediately.
Posted by: Steven Erat at June 15, 2004 1:59 PM
Silly old Microsoft! I don't even believe they have full rights to the TerraServer name anymore... I've done quite a bit of consulting work for TerraServer.com.. IIRC they are now setup to allow for choosing of different imagery providers after your search. Scarier yet... the fact that we are probably only a few years away from imagery that is only 24 hours old... man I love GIS!!
Posted by: Critter at June 15, 2004 9:47 PM
btw. we are in the process of developing webservices that will allow users/subscribers to tie our systems into theirs.. makes pulling the images easy as pie! man I love CFMX!!
Posted by: Critter at June 15, 2004 9:50 PM
Hey, Critter... nice photos on the CFTalk community page.... OUCH!
Posted by: Steven Erat at June 16, 2004 3:58 PM
lol, forgot about those! Here's a nice little collage(sp?) I put together:
Posted by: Critter at June 16, 2004 10:25 PM