Satellite Pictures For The Masses: Google Earth

Oh to watch the world go by from 40,000 feet. When I fly I love gazing down at the hills, mountains, lakes, streets and tiny, tiny cars. Then I doze and miss a few hundred miles at a time. Today that’s okay, because now I can catch up on what I missed wtih Google’s free Earth-watching program, Google Earth.

Google Earth is the world according to satellite photos. It documents almost every corner of our planet with high enough resolution pictures of most areas to actually see your own car on the street if you were parked there when the picture was taken. It’s not real time, so you can’t do much quality stalking with the software, but almost everything is visible since all the shots were taken during the day, and likely in summer. There isn’t much you can’t see from the sky, but for some reason pictures of Teheran and Davis, CA are in very low resolution.