"Where to find most up-to-date satellite imagery?" Topic

I live in western North Carolina, where there is a major construction project taking place on US 64 between Murphy and Peachtree. It crosses the Hiwassee River and supposedly straightens out the old highway. I'd really like to see the current aerial view of this project, but haven't been able to find sites with pictures that weren't over 5 or more years old. Anyone out there know where the really CURRENT photos can be found?

Hmmm.. Getting *current* sattelite photos is *damn* hard.. Google maps can be as new as six months, I've heard, but that's no promise.

You may be SOL… ah! I have it!

Ask around for 'Aerial Photography' in your area.. It'llbe shot from a plane, but they're more likely to have it already, or even be willing to nab a photo of it on their next flight out for a modest fee…

My wife uses this all of the time to confirm flood-zone determinations:

earth.google.com
She says to click on "Get Google Earth (Free Version)".

Hope it helps.

CC

Sadly, a lot of the imagery in Google Earth is rather old. In particular, in North Carolina. However, it's worth a shot! Beside, it's a damned cool program! :-)

Sadly, a lot of the imagery in Google Earth is rather old. In particular, in North Carolina. However, it's worth a shot! Beside, it's a damned cool program! :-)>>>>>>

Yeah, but it is cool to go to naval bases and look at the warships in port at the time of the photo. Portsmouth England has Victory and a slew of warships in port. You can see the Arizona and Utah underwater at Pearl Harbor. Houston has the BB Texas, Boston has Constitution, and Davis-Montham in Tuscon has the Aircraft Boneyard. You can also find Pegasus Bridge and other WWII sites. Unfortunately Scapa Flow is blocked out. I really wanted to see if you could see the sunken German fleet from space. And a lot of the world just isn't there in much detail, but a lot of interesting places are.

local.live.com is pretty impressive, but I'm not sure if there's even a way to tell the vintage of the photos.

Doug

GoogleEarth is pretty poor once you get out of the US… for example the last time I looked for Germany the only thing you could really zoom in on was the Reichstag.

Cheers,

Burkhard

14, coverage seems spotty but improving. I planed my walks and shopping rounds for my London holiday last year with google earth. I can zoom on Stockholm well enough to plan an assault on the Royal Castle. Last year I looked at Köln and could not make out the Dom. Just tried it today and could count the small arches on the sides.

Thomas is right… just went to check it out… they really updated it with higher res pictures. Now you get all of the major spots in towns like Berlin or the citys with matches in the WC for Germany. Man I could finally make out my own home (although by far not at a the res I know from my work). BTW… juding by the fact that I can see the construction work that took place on the next main road a few years ago and one garden project we had I can say that the pictures of Germany are from 2003 June or July.

Cheers,

Burkhard

"Google maps can be as new as six months, I've heard, but that's no promise."

*AS NEW AS* is pretty meaningless. The Google maps photos of Disney World, for example, show the "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" ride. It hasn't been around for more than a decade. In contrast, the Yahoo maps photos show construction on the same site; they're more than a year old, but less than five.

The really recent/current stuff is not free, typically, but is out there. Check at Terraserver.com. The free section (the Terraserver site with microsoft in its path) is very nice, but typically a little older and US only. The commercial section is another matter…

Check with your local county. Usually with the Assessor's Office, but sometimes with a Planning & Zoning Department or (if really sophisticated) some sort of IT/MIS/GIS department.

It may not be free to purchase, but they might have a kiosk to view it.

I was poking around the NCDOT website to see if there was a project website. There are 3 current projects that involve US 64. None of which are in Cherokee County.

link

Try the "Contact Us" link from here:

ncdot.org/doh/impact

They might be able to help, as well.

for fun sometime, scroll around downtown chicago on google maps (or google earth – i think they use the same images). They must have stitched together several different exposures from different angles – the buildings all point different ways. It's very cthuloid

"They must have stitched together several different exposures from different angles"

True of any aerial photo set, actually. Large urban areas make it more obvious, though.

Thanks, guys. While Google Earth is impressive, the winner is local.live.com. You can zoom in pretty close, and still have good focus on what you're looking at. Google Earth goes fuzzy on you as you get to the really close zoom-ins. Special thanks to elsyrsyn for turning us on to this site!

Just tried local.live. Guess we'll have to wait for Sweden to become detailed. In google I can see the construction of the bridge I pass over every morning. Detailed but out of date. In local I can barely make out the place where the bridge is and cannot tell if the new bridge is up or if it is just the old bridge.