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Google Maps wipes clouds from the sky, provides greater global detail

Written by James Delahunty @ 26 Jun 2013 5:46 User comments (5)

Google Maps wipes clouds from the sky, provides greater global detail

Google has made vast improvements to its Earth satellite imagery across several of its products, cleaning up previous bad images and wiping even clouds from the skies.
The improvement virtually eliminates clouds, includes refreshed imagery for regions of the world where high-resolution imagery is not yet available, and offers a more comprehensive and accurate view of the texture of our planet's landscape.

Using Google Earth Engine technology, Google's engineers mined hundreds of terabytes of data from the USGS's and NASA's Landsat 7 satellite, resulting in an image of the entire planet with a resolution of 15 meters per pixel.

The resulting 800,000 megapixel global image is so big that if you wanted to print it at a standard resolution of 300 dots per inch you would need a piece of paper the size of a city block.

Check out Google's Maps blog for pictures highlighting improvements.

Tags: Google Maps
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5 user comments

126.6.2013 18:20

Microsoft sends up planes to make clouds...google erases them...Apple says that a cloud in the middle of the ocean is Iran. :)

226.6.2013 19:07

i thought it was north korea or is it that sky floating nsa platform spying on the world's cellphone traffic?

326.6.2013 22:04

Wow. To live in this day and age.

427.6.2013 13:55

Google Maps wipes clouds from the sky, providing the NSA a greater global detail to spy on us.
NSA Troll: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BNyL6LJCUAA2F5v.jpg:large

This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 27 Jun 2013 @ 2:15

528.6.2013 07:49

I'm waiting for them to improve the resolution to the point where they can eliminate that constantly barking dog up my street.

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