I’ve personally lost more than a few hours exploring these virtual worlds from the comfort of my home office. Top-down view of a courtyard in the "suburbs" of Hong Kong. A map of these enhanced areas can be found here. In recent years, you may have run across areas where far more detailed three-dimensional data and imagery are available. The end result is that they’re adding that much data to the repository again every year or two. This both keeps the imagery up to date and retains an interactive historical record of how the Earth is changing over time. That's “big data.”Īdditionally, they try to update the imagery for major cities more than once a year and for other areas every couple of years. Zoomed in all the way, the full picture of the earth is more than 500 million pixels on a side and, even when compressed, corresponds to more than 25,000 terabytes of data (and you thought the Sony A7R IV’s piddly 61MP, 9,504 x 6,336 resolution was impressive). ![]() There are 20 additional zoom levels beyond that capturing ever-increasing levels of detail across the globe. Even the distant “pretty view” of the earth we see when zoomed all the way out is stitched together from something like 700,000 separate Landsat images totaling about 800 billion pixels (check out this great overview video). ![]() Still, what’s going on beneath the hood and the sheer size of the numbers involved is jaw-dropping. We’ve become accustomed to being able to zoom in to meter-scale resolution just about anywhere on the planet from our phones. Over the last 15 years, our interaction with this stunning perspective of the Earth has become so routine that it might not seem so impressive. ![]() These top-down photographs come almost exclusively from satellites. Both Google Earth and Google Maps have incorporated basic two-dimensional imagery since they first launched in 2005.
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