High Above the Earth
Posted by Patrick on Saturday, November 19, 2005
Google, the once small search engine company has expanded their offerings to give information on pretty much everything in human existence. Ever. One of their newer products is Google Earth, a stand-alone application that squishes together lots of satellite, mapping, and community data together in a very easy-to-use system. It's like Google Local (once called Google Maps), but much more visually appealing and fun to use.
Kate and I both dig this program. The satellite imagery, especially in our area, is high quality. You can see my car from space! Very cool stuff. Of course the imagery isn't real-time (that would be a little scary), but the images were taken a few years ago and compiled by Google. I'm not sure of when exactly, but yesterday I discovered the date may be carved in stone....
... as you move just south of our neighborhood, you'll see a large field.
This field has little tiny evenly placed rectangles in it. Zooming in closer reveals that its a cemetery, just a short distance from our place.
The level of detail you can get from orbit is just astounding. It looks like there are a bunch of cars parked in the cemetery.
Google Earth actually captured this person's burial, whenever the satellite flew overhead, snapping photos of the planet below. Kind of strange - I'm sure the people there had no idea they were being photographed from orbit, and yet that moment of time was preserved and added to a software program.
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