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July 11, 2005
What did you find on Googlemaps?
So I'm looking for satellite imagery of the island of Marawah around 100 kilometres to the west of the city of Abu Dhabi, just to the north of the Khor al Bazm. I end up with a traditional satellite image courtesy of Googlemaps:
So far so handy. I can zoom in on the island, not quite close enough to make out any real detail, but close enough to show geophysical features that when overlain onto the map of settlements makes some sort of sense (dwellings near a river, an old track linking two places an so on). Pretty neat, so I start looking at Abu Dhabi and the desert to the south. What I'm finding amazing is the level of detail you can get on some of these scan areas:
I don't know if this is an American base, but that big grey thing on the runway sure looks like a B52 (note the empty parking spot between the other planes). The little, white, rectangular hut on the right looks a lot like the hardened hangars you operate out of in the FA/18-Hornet flight sim.
Of course, with no idea of the time the photograph was taken, there is very little 'intelligence' value in this kind of image. Still, it's kinda odd being able to look at these images. Try scrolling your viewport over to North Korea--if they new the level of detail (hydro-electrics and other industrial facilities are all sharp as a pin on the close-up) being shown on Google, the NK censorship guys would have a fit!
Oh and you know, I've been fantasising abot the day when asynchronous javascript would let me load an image in anticipation of it being requested by the user. I could just drool at that scroll action all day...
