House 3
Are you looking for an aerial view of your home? Good news! There are aerial satellite images of every spot on Earth, and these pictures are available on the Internet, for free. It’s an amazing time to be alive.
The best place to start is Google Maps. This is a free service from Google that uses satellite and aerial imagery to provide aerial view of homes of any spot on Earth. It works within any regular web browser, so you just need to be connected to the Internet to access it. You can see street maps and then satellite maps. If you put in a specific address, it’ll take you directly to that location, anywhere on Earth.
Another cool tool to give an aerial view my house from Google is Google Earth. Unlike Google Maps, you have to actually download and install this application onto your local computer (PC, Mac, Linux and iPhone). Then you get to see a rotating 3-D version of the Earth that you can spin around and zoom in and out to look at any spot on the planet. You do need to be connected to the Internet while you’re using it, since it needs to actively download the aerial views for whatever spot you’re looking at. I like using Google Earth if I need to print something off, because it connects to my printer better than Google Maps.
If you want to actually purchase an aerial photograph of your home, you can go right to the source; to the companies that build and manage the satellites that take these high resolution images of the planet. The first company is GeoEye; they manage 3 satellites: GeoEye-1, IKONOS, and OrbView-2. They have a partnership with several companies that let you purchase satellite photos of any spot on Earth. Another company that offers the same service is DigitalGlobe. They have their own constellation of satellites, and you can purchase high resolution images through their partners. Just a warning, though, it’s pretty expensive to use either company.
Another cool service you can look at is the USGS Earth Explorer. You can access different photography datasets and then view the Earth from different views.
We have featured many satellite views of the planet Earth for Universe Today. Here’s an article about satellite images of the earth, and here’s an article about launching your own personal satellite.
If you’d like more info about the Earth, check out Visible Earth, and here’s a link to the NASA Earth Observatory Homepage.
We’ve also recorded related episodes of Astronomy Cast about the Earth. Listen here, Episode 51: Earth.
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