Satellite Images: My House
Written by Fraser Cain
Satellite view of the White House. Image credit: Google Maps
There are many resources for satellite images on the Internet. You can can see beautiful deserts and oceans, farms and cities. But what about resources for seeing a specific address from space? Again, the Internet comes to your rescue. There are many tools out there that let you punch in an address and zoom right in to see satellite images. My house, your house, any place on Earth.
The easiest tool to access is Google Maps. This is a free service from Google that runs in your browser. You just type in the address of the location that you want to see. Google Maps will show you a satellite view of the location, as well as labels for road maps and important placemarks. But you can turn those off if you like.
Another cool tool from Google is Google Earth. Unlike Google Maps, though, you need to download Google Earth to your local computer (PC or Mac); you can even get a version that runs on your iPhone. Then you can see a cool spinning globe that lets you zoom in and out down to any location on Earth. You can also type in an address. Google Earth pulls in its map data through the Internet to give you a seamless view of the Earth from space.
If you don't want to use Google, you can access a cool tool from NASA called NASA World Wind. This is similar to Google Earth; it's an application that you download and install on your local computer. It uses Earth images from NASA to display a view of Earth from space that you can zoom in and check out a satellite image from space.
There are also similar services from Microsoft and Yahoo that you can use.
Please keep in mind that none of these services offer a live satellite view of Earth. All the photographs that you see were taken at some point in the last few years.
We have written many articles about viewing Earth from above. Here's an article about Earth from space at night, and here are pictures of disasters from space.
We have also recorded an entire episode of Astronomy Cast just about our planet. Listen to it here, Episode 51: Earth.
Filed under: Astronomy
Tags: Earth, Earth Observation, satellite, satellite images, satellite view
