Longer-term timelapses of the surface of our planet can be found on Google Earth Timelapse (or through another weekend project of mine, namely a Twitter bot that posts randomly selected timelapses off it), but what's available there doesn't reach the high resolution of Google Maps (and isn't available for 45-degree views). Select Location: Zoom into the specific area of interest, using the maps intuitive controls. This kind of imagery looks great wherever skyscrapers are around – say, in New York City:īecause Google regularly removes the oldest available versions, all of this is rather ephemeral – a year from now (which, at the time of writing, was July 2021), the invocations of this tool that have created the GIFs above may yield totally different results. This expansive tool is a gateway to the worlds geographic history. It's also fun to look at airports and center pivot irrigation fields through the lens this tool provides:Īs an alternative to the usual straight-down imagery, which is great for navigating but obscures the verticality of buildings and structures, Google Maps also provides oblique views shot at a 45-degree angle – from all of the four cardinal directions – for many urban areas. Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 imagesa total of 909 terabytes of datato find the highest-quality pixels (e.g. There's usually two or three different views of any given area available in the "version history", which can yield neat 3D effects (the attributes contain the invocations used to generate them):įor areas of the world that have changed significantly recently, flipping through the imagery versions is almost like a timelapse – consider the port of Beirut before and after the 2020 explosion on the left, or the perpetually-over-budget-and-behind-schedule construction of the new Stuttgart central station on the right. Google Maps Timeline is a personal map that helps you remember routes and trips youve taken and places youve been based on your Location History. Scroll down to learn how to set it up on your machine, or stay up here for some examples. For a more localized focus, the USGS Earth Explorer provides specialized tools for accessing and analyzing historical satellite imagery. This expansive tool is a gateway to the worlds geographic history. ![]() This weekend project is based on ærialbot, a previous weekend project of mine. Open Google Maps: Commence your historical exploration by navigating to Google Maps in your preferred web browser. ![]() This Python-based tool automatically crawls its way through these versions, figuring out which provide unique imagery and downloading it for a user-defined (that's you! you get to define things!) area, eventually assembling it in the form of a GIF. The folks maintaining Google Maps regularly update the satellite imagery it serves its users, but outdated versions of the imagery are kept around for a year or two.
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