No, that is not a Satellite Image
Written by Chad on March 23rd, 2007
There seems to be some confusion lately going around. It has come up on the World Wind Forum and now another blogger seems to think this area in Africa was imaged by a satellite. Here are the coordinates in question that seem to come up the most: 15.298683 19.429651 (plug that into GE).
What you will get is a closeup of a location in Africa and you will see that an image has been added in. Zoom in closer and you see livestock, a well and people standing around. Now, for some reason, viewers of the spot keep thinking it is a satellite image. and in case of the blog post I read today: “How long before all of the Earth’s surface is available at this level of detail, live?”
At that level of detail? Most likely never. Live? Only in the movies. It is from a satellite? No.
No? Yes, no. It is an arial image from a plane. Yes you can get high detail from space but you are limited to just HOW good it is because of atmospheric conditions. And you can tell this was a flyover image because everyone is looking up AT the camera.
I seem to recall reading on the GE forums a while back that someone had done a plane trip over Africa and in some areas he had taken pictures from the plane of the ground. And these were since added to GE. But, I really don’t feel up to searching the entire GE forum for that post.
Maybe now I can stop seeing the “look how close they can get with these satellites!” posts… probably not 
Edit: Ok, in doing some unrelated Googling.. I came across a page that talked about the NRO’s Keyhole satellites. And it seems that most of them have a resolution resolving of objects 4 to 6 inches in size (not confirmed of course). So .. yes the imagery “can” be done.. but none of us will see it, and they are looking mainly at “Hot Spot” areas.
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Here is a recent blog post from Google Earth Blog about those very high resolution aerial photos (which came from National Geographic Magazine’s Michael Fay). They are called the MegaFlyover collection.
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National Geographic! I knew it was something like that. Thanks for the pointer.
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Wonder if they would let us make a WW add-on, feel like asking Cahd?
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I thought it was clear that those images were taken from a plane. I guess there’s always someone who doesn’t get the joke.
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I am the blogger you reference in your post who you say seems to think that the image in Google Maps (NOT Google Earth) was taken from satellite. I do not, nor do I ever say that in my post.
Actually I have been trying to disspell the same misconception about New Jersey aerial imagery in Google Maps/Earth ever since Google Maps launched, back in 2004.
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So you mean to tell me. I’ve been lied to all these years about the ablility of satellites? I’m assuming when one mentions satellites in a generic manner. It’s commerical satellites?
Limitations are atmospheric(as mentioned), technology, and field of view. From what I’ve been made to understand, inside and outside of the defense dept. It’s not far fetched to believe the ablility to see a man-hole cover and pick out the lettering on it. Granted you will only see the man-hole cover and nothing else, due to fov.
The real-time, I’ve heard differing stories. But with the addition of aerial assets, real-time is possible. Again limited to fov and area of coverage.
KoS
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“Live” geospatial imagery capabilities have existed for many years. There are more than a few airborne systems that can feed real time video and near real time stills to a ground station, giving analysts amazing access from a temporal standpoint. These images and video have a geospatial component. Most of these developments are defense related, but even the Forest Service uses UAVs for fire monitoring. Getting this “live” data to something like Google Earth would be extremely challenging due to the compression algorithms Google employs. Are there misconceptions - you but. But I am constantly amazing by the amount of experienced geospatial professional who think there is no such thing as real time geospatial remote sensing.
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Oh I am sure most people do know their is such imagery and data. Problem is, most people think of it in terms of the movies.
Some groups that use WW, are using it for “live” data. Well, with how it all works.. it is probably delayed by 2-3 minutes due to processing and refreshing the view.