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gidon

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http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov

World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there.

Virtually visit any place in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps, or along the African Sahara.

I'll be downloading this over lunch - looks intriguing!

Cheers

Gidon
 
This looks like a great toy - cheers! :D

Hmm, interesting. NASA are using BitTorrent to distribute their software. That's great news, because it's yet another nail in the coffin of the music and movie industry's attempt to get it banned; they claim it only gets used "to distribute stolen content", whereas the reality is that it's just a protocol like FTP...
 
We must all be trying to download at the same time - my speed has just plummeted down from 92.3KB/Sec to 33.4KB/Sec :cry: How did we ever manage before broadband :?: :-s
Thanks for the link Tony. Looks like it'll be worth the wait.
 
Wow! It's pretty amazing!

Chris - agree would be nice if you get even higher resolution - but still impressive. I'm sure companies like "getmapping" wouldn't be happy if you could effectively get high resolution aerial maps of anyone in the world for free! Will check out your link ...

Have you tried right-clicking and draging to see a view from eye level. Then hit numbers 1-9 (little to lot) to exaggerate the elevations. Looks pretty good for my area.

Chiba - missed the bittorrent link but seemed to come down pretty quickly anyway. You can see your apartment - I can barely see my whole village!

Aragorn - I must look like Tony :).
 
Gidon,

Maybe I am doing something wrong. The program seems to download no new data. Is there a way to force it to fecth new data from the NASA servers?
 
Chris

Can't find a way to force new data to be received. I'm not getting much higher resolution than this for my area - but I think it does depend on location:



Same as you're getting? It says in the feature list the resolution is 15m per pixel.

Cheers

Gidon
 
Gidon,

Thanks, yes it seems to be the same resolution. I think I must have misunderstood what was "advertised".

I was hoping for something approaching what the site I mentioned can offer - like this one of my house :-

Waterhead.jpg
 
Roger, if the neighbours ever move, I'll buy the house and build a proper workshop!

There is a cost - but it was something like £7 for a week's access to the server which enabled you to download anything you liked within that time - so dirt cheap if you want to sit at your computer and enter a bunch of addresses!

The images are from different periods - they are dated but as it happens I was able to date this photo within a few days because of the cars sitting on my driveway.
 
waterhead37":1hhcngsb said:
I think I must have misunderstood what was "advertised".

Only in that there's a difference between what's available for the US and the rest of the world. I believe the 15m imaging only covers the US (not unfair since US taxpayers funded the exercise).

In the UK that quality is available but we have to pay for it through public bodies like the Ordnance Survey, and private companies who have licensed the imagery (and yes, we taxpayers already paid for it, but the government insists we pay for it again!)

Once you move beyond the data that NASA owns outright, it becomes a nightmare of copyrights and licences. I've always been impressed by the extent to which NASA makes this kind of thing freely and publicly available.
 
Pete,

Yes NASA do a very good job - I guess they need to persuade the public to keep approving their astronomical budgets (no apology for the pun!)

Here is another, this time by Google - great data for London and the USA plus some other countries but little coverage of the UK generally. You really can see fine detail with this

http://www.keyhole.com/gm
 

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