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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Earth Observations _ Highest publicly-avaliable Earth Satellite Images

Posted by: tuvas Apr 10 2007, 03:14 PM

What is the highest resolution publicly-available pictures of the Earth? Just trying to find out, thanks!

Posted by: dvandorn Apr 10 2007, 03:17 PM

I imagine there are electron microscope images of dirt out there somewhere... oh, you meant from orbit?

-the other Doug

Posted by: djellison Apr 10 2007, 03:22 PM

Well - a lot of google earth stuff is aerial photography, some of it is satellite (most of the UK is aerial) , Quickbird is 60cm/pixel orbital.

http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/qb/cornmaze_oct9_2006_dgwm.jpg
http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/qb/new_york_city_gz_july18_2006_dgwm.jpg
http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/qb/las_vegas_midstrip_oct14_2005_dgwm.jpg

As with that period between MOLA and the second SRTM mission - Publicly available data for Mars is better than that for Earth.

Doug

Posted by: babakm Apr 10 2007, 03:35 PM

DigitalGlobe (linked by Doug above) claims the highest resolution publicly available pix (and charges for access), but I found that Google Earth had the exact same image on it's site... for my neighborhood around Washington, DC at least.

Posted by: dvandorn Apr 10 2007, 03:48 PM

Interestingly, The Weather Channel's website has recently rolled out a new visualization for their radar/satellite map display. It resembles Google Earth, in that you can zoom in to very-high-resolution aerial photography (where available). Until you get to the highest resolution views, you can even overlay real-time satellite and radar imagery (with your choice of transparency) over the aerial photography.

I don't recall offhand who provides the actual photography used on this site, but I can tell you that, at least for the area right around my own house, it is of higher resolution than that offered by Google Earth (and the Google Earth view is comparable to the best resolution available anywhere in Google Earth). I have no idea what the actual resolutions are, but if the Google Earth site is giving 50cm resolution, I'd have to say that the Weather Channel site is giving at least 30cm resolution. At least in my neighborhood.

The Weather Channel site is also more up-to-date -- the Google Earth images of my neighborhood show a local light rail system still under construction, when it has actually been finished (and is shown as finished on the Weather Channel site) for a good two years, now.

-the other Doug

Posted by: babakm Apr 10 2007, 05:32 PM

Hmm. The Weather Channel (actually Microsoft Virtual Earth) image for my neighborhood is again the exact same image as Google and DigitalGlobe.

Posted by: Juramike Apr 10 2007, 05:45 PM

There is also Wikimapia : http://www.wikimapia.org

For the area near my house Wikimapia and Google Earth images are the same.

The Weather Channel satellite zoom is a few years out of date. (About 3 by my estimate).

-Mike

Posted by: Adzel Feb 6 2008, 06:54 PM

I realize this post is old, but here are some WorldView-1 images taken during the satellite's check-out last October (2007).

http://news.satimagingcorp.com/2007/10/new_satellite_images_from_worldview-1.html

Maybe they have more elsewhere. Likely at the Digital Globe site listed in one of the prior posts.

Adzel

Posted by: PhilCo126 Feb 7 2008, 01:03 PM

There’s the French SPOT ( Satellite Pour Observation de la Terre ) website but You have to pay for high res images:
http://www.spotimage.fr/web/en/171-products-and-services.php
and
http://sirius.spotimage.fr/PageSearch.aspx?language=UK&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1