2.5 Gigapixel

[PressX]

Pictastic (http://triton.tpd.tno.nl/gigazoom/delft2.htm)

[primesuspect]

insanely cool.

Speaking of which, has anybody tried out Keyhole (http://www.keyhole.com)? Google apparently bought them. I downloaded the trial, and MAN is it cool. Me and the kids spent like two hours just looking at stuff the other night. I think playing with keyhole gave my kids the first impression of how big the earth truly is. They were in awe.

I can see my pond, my mailbox, and my landscaping... from space! :thumbsup:

[RWB]

look at the bicyclist... two people in one area or something. Also found a guy torn in half, as if he was dissapearing in time!! OMG!!! Its teh end of the worlds!!!!

[KilJaeden]

Holy ****! You can read the license plates! ;D

EDIT:// this shot was taken in segments wasn't it? Because half of a bus is missing and in its place is a sedan.

[Josh-]

Amazing :p

[KilJaeden]

Anyone else feel like there is a Where's Waldo game coming on?

[Straight_Man]

NASA's LANDSAT series of satellite can do things almost that good, and NASA has a LANDSAT file viewer for the public, also. BUT, Keyhole WAS the name of a US spy sat SERIES.... Hmm.... Intelligence SAT archives???? Interesting, and not something I am sure is actually totally declassified ATM, unless the Keyholes have been superceded-- they have been up for quite a while (45 years plus from first Keyhole launch now, and the first Keyhole did NOT have that kind of res available), so if they have been replaced then the old sats and dataflow downstreams might be declassified in part.... Or parts of archives might have been declassified as a demo of what our intelligence tech can do (AND has been able to do for quite a while).... LANDSAT was used over Florida, to show the eye of Hurricane Charley over Punta Gorda (buildings could be seen through the eye, for example, though people were not out and about needless to say), for example, and that info was passed to the public TV press.

LANDSAT can also penetrate landmasses to a degree, and show densities of land and voids like underground caves.... Keyhole was mostly optical and IR, LANDSAT Series is much more versatile than that. The landsat info I got from folks in NASA and NOAA, and soem retirees from those agencies. Keyhole, I will not say where my first info came from, except that it was military sources I knew personally.

[entropy]

insanely cool.

Speaking of which, has anybody tried out Keyhole (http://www.keyhole.com)? Google apparently bought them. I downloaded the trial, and MAN is it cool. Me and the kids spent like two hours just looking at stuff the other night. I think playing with keyhole gave my kids the first impression of how big the earth truly is. They were in awe.

I can see my pond, my mailbox, and my landscaping... from space! :thumbsup:
I knew that Google acquired Keyhole, but I never checked it out. Pretty awesome. One gripe, however. Brown/gray must mean, "Cool! Lots of people - lots of things to look at!" Green areas must stand for, "MOVE TO THE DAMN CITY, YA HICK!" :( Was actually looking forward to seeing my yard from that far up. Oh well, I suppose it'd take too much storage space for them to catalog EVERY square mile...

[bothered]

Keyhole is brilliant prime. Have you let snuffie out? what's that on your lawn?

[Nomad]

At first I thought, 2.5 mp and I said, "Who cares." Then I clicked picture D:

[S_Wilson]

NASA has an excellent project going now called World Wind. They believe education will generate interest which will generate funding, which is probably true. The project is still beta and is free to use.

Project main page: http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/worldwind/

Download (253MB) http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/archives/worldwind-1_2.zip

FAQ Page (from Forums) http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/worldwind/forums/index.php?showtopic=148

World Wind Forums: http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/worldwind/forums/

Since they were /. back in September, the JPL Landsat 7 Servers have been down. They are working toward correcting this putting up new servers to handle the load. In the meantime you can download Cache files from Nasa and from other users.

Nasa Cache files: http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/worldwind/cache.html

Also a Neat site about what others have found: http://worldwind.phonecampix.net/

The program also has USGS Urban Ortho Imagery which is downloaded from USGS as needed. So now here are some SS.

1. Mt St Helens from Landsat Cache
2. B52's at Barksdale AFB from USGS Urban Ortho

[S_Wilson]

3. Downtown Denver USGS Urban Ortho
4. Pentagon USGS Urban Ortho

[Gargoyle]

NASA's LANDSAT series of satellite can do things almost that good, ...
LANDSAT can also penetrate landmasses to a degree, and show densities of land and voids like underground caves.... Keyhole was mostly optical and IR, LANDSAT Series is much more versatile than that. The landsat info I got from folks in NASA and NOAA, and soem retirees from those agencies. Keyhole, I will not say where my first info came from, except that it was military sources I knew personally.

Landsat is only 30m resolution though. These images are high enough resolution to be aerial photography, IKONOS, or Quickbird (~1ft, 1m, .6m). EDIT: Images are copyright "Airphoto USA." That makes sense.

There are free aerial photographs available for most of the Unites States, but most are in B&W. Fine for scientific purposes really. But for some places (Most of Massachussetts for example), there are free color orthophotos available. If anybody wants a .avi virtual flythrough of their area, ask me real nice before I leave my job and all of our fancy software this December :D.

Of course, there's Landsat available for the whole country, but cities are little more than white blobs. You can probably pick out highways, that's about it.

[EMT]

insanely cool.

Speaking of which, has anybody tried out Keyhole (http://www.keyhole.com)? Google apparently bought them. I downloaded the trial, and MAN is it cool. Me and the kids spent like two hours just looking at stuff the other night. I think playing with keyhole gave my kids the first impression of how big the earth truly is. They were in awe.

I can see my pond, my mailbox, and my landscaping... from space! :thumbsup:
I gave keyhole a try - the website made it sound waaay cool. But it was too slow and not 3D enough IMO, although I'll try it again now that I'm back home (it would be sad if cable worked better than the University connection).

[Gargoyle]

3D is a difficult thing to do in this sort of application though. Geography nerd explanation follows:

A grad student here at OU just finished a project making a 3d model of a small section of downtown Oklahoma City. The main challenge to overcome when building the 3d model is the data source. Blueprints are useful for building footprints, but should someone trust them for determining the final height of the building? And even if so, the amount of time required to collect and extract data for every building is mind-boggling. You can use Lidar (light detection and ranging) to get elevation data, but that would require an aircraft flyover of the entire study area (the whole planet if we're talking about Keyhole). Publicly available satellite elevation data isn't nearly high enough resolution to be useful. In the grad student's research, he learned that even Lidar has limits. It tends to report elevations more than 5 meters too high or too low under certain conditions. And, if the Lidar data isn't collected at the same time as the airphoto, some things wouldn't look right (building construction, seasonal changes in vegetation density and height, etc.).