Probably everybody knows this one, and nobody ever posted because of the obviousity of this link, but you can count on me to do it!

http://earth.google.com/

Pretty impressive "useless-that-you-must-have" tool, seeing planes in airports, or building's shadows is quite neaty.

Enjoy!

Makes me think about the movie: Enemy of the state, heh.

You can get an interesting view of the White House using Google Satellite.

There was a program called Terraserve a while ago, that was created by the US government. Similar concept, was kind of cool looking at my house from a bird's eye view.

Terraserver is still up and running.... Google uses keyhole I believe..

Awesome.

Oh... by the way... apparently they arn't doing any more beta downloads of it at the moment (least when I tried), but you can still get it from Download.com.

Thanks alot Akom, wanted one that was worldwide, unlike terraserver.

Kinda neat, just too bad that the pictures are so old.

More satellite data will no doubt be added and updated over the next 2 to 3 years I am thinking.

As you drill down on a certain area of the globe you will notice a label on the bottom of the map indicating which satellite feed the information is coming from. I.e. - if you drill down onto Iceland you will notice its data is feed by a combination of EarthSat, NIMA and DigitalGlobe data.

Different parts of the earth are mapped by different satellites , past and present. Goolge Earth (or Keyhole) simply takes all of that satellite imagry from desperate sources and melds them into a slick global drill down visualization.

Some satellite data is specific to certain parts of the earth depending on their orbits and at what elevation the satellite has been placed, indeed even what type of imaging technology (cameras, telescopes) the satellite has onboard will determine the type of data it will produce.

Some satellites have been injected into low polar orbits, so much of their data may be of polar regions since they fly over these areas frequently. Some other satellites may be in a geosynronous orbit and may only focus on certain continents or oceans.

I very much hope that Google Earth will start to take in other satellite data feeds like weather data from GOES and such. Being able to drill down onto the globe and see hurricane data real time would be awesome.

Already I have noticed additions to the google earth dataset. Indiana is now about 90% imaged... that is simply incredible as we get to use that data for free... only 2 or 3 years ago that data would cost you a very pretty penny in imagery supscriptions or software licensing.

I read one reviewers take on Google Earth... he said something to the effect that "this is the best free download of all free downloads to hit the internet in sometime". I agree fully with him :).

Google Earth now has a permanent home on my desktop. Lets just hope the service remains free to all and that the beta is removed soon.

Cheers,

Lokase

"Hey, I can see my house from up here!"