Hi Folks,
This is for people who have been using Google Maps (or equivalently Google Earth, since they seem to use exactly the same sattelite imagery):
http://maps.google.com http://earth.google.com
It's some weeks since I last had a look around using Google Maps, and I did it again last night (with both Earth and Maps). It seems to me that the terrain images used have degraded.
1: They seem to be fuzzier, and with less vivid colour, at the larger zoom levels
2: I'm sure they are older
than they used to be. In particular, the aerial view of my own house used to show a car I owned a few years back parked at the front, from which (and from other vehicles in the neighbourhood) I inferred that the image dated from around 2002 (certainly not before 2001). And the back garden was much as it was when I moved in in 2001: green throughout, with grass and bushes.
Last night, however, there were no bushes in the back garden and at the rear was a large brown, presumably cultivated, area. Now the people before the people before me had a vegetable garden there, which tallies with the image, but the people before me did not (having turned the whole garden over to lawn and shrubs), so that puts the date of the photo over 10 years old.
Although the displayed images state "Copyright 2007", this clearly has nothing to do with the date of the photography.
I'd be a bit miffed if Google had decided to degrade the quality and especially the timeliness of their images! I fairly regularly use it as a resouce for getting an overview of an area, and until now I've relied on the imagery being not more than a few years old. If, as now seems to be the case, it may be over (even well over) 10 years, then the relevance to recent conditions is seriously diminished!
Comments from Google Earthers/Mapsters welcome!
Best wishes to all, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 23-Sep-07 Time: 11:48:20 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
On Sun, 2007-09-23 at 11:48 +0100, ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
It's some weeks since I last had a look around using Google Maps, and I did it again last night (with both Earth and Maps). It seems to me that the terrain images used have degraded.
1: They seem to be fuzzier, and with less vivid colour, at the larger zoom levels
Bury St Edmunds is brighter, but fuzzier and at large zoom levels looks more like a scan from a printed picture than it ever did (now you get fuzzy noise like on on scanned print whereas before it was more like compression artifacts but the overall image detail was much sharper)
2: I'm sure they are older
Bury is definitely older, it used to be about 2-3 years old but looking at developments around the town where ground hasn't even been cleared on the map I would put it at circa 2000, maybe even earlier.
The only positive improvement is that Bury is now a consistent state across the whole town, whereas before the town was split North/South with much lower resolution towards the south.
I wonder if this is what they have done, as many towns were a patchwork quilt of smaller areas taken on different days (with different brightness levels and resolution) and in doing so they have sacrificed the age/quality of maps in some areas for uniformity.
On my version there is an overlay called Digital Globe Coverage (very bottom of the list) that will overlay the date that each area was photographed on.
The Moreton Hall area of Bury is now on 5 July 2003 when it has been more recent as some of the new estates have now disappeared from Google Earth.
Regards, Rob.
On 23 Sep 2007, at 11:48, (Ted Harding) wrote:
Hi Folks,
This is for people who have been using Google Maps (or equivalently Google Earth, since they seem to use exactly the same sattelite imagery):
http://maps.google.com http://earth.google.com
It's some weeks since I last had a look around using Google Maps, and I did it again last night (with both Earth and Maps). It seems to me that the terrain images used have degraded.
1: They seem to be fuzzier, and with less vivid colour, at the larger zoom levels
2: I'm sure they are older
than they used to be. In particular, the aerial view of my own house used to show a car I owned a few years back parked at the front, from which (and from other vehicles in the neighbourhood) I inferred that the image dated from around 2002 (certainly not before 2001). And the back garden was much as it was when I moved in in 2001: green throughout, with grass and bushes.
Last night, however, there were no bushes in the back garden and at the rear was a large brown, presumably cultivated, area. Now the people before the people before me had a vegetable garden there, which tallies with the image, but the people before me did not (having turned the whole garden over to lawn and shrubs), so that puts the date of the photo over 10 years old.
Although the displayed images state "Copyright 2007", this clearly has nothing to do with the date of the photography.
I'd be a bit miffed if Google had decided to degrade the quality and especially the timeliness of their images! I fairly regularly use it as a resouce for getting an overview of an area, and until now I've relied on the imagery being not more than a few years old. If, as now seems to be the case, it may be over (even well over) 10 years, then the relevance to recent conditions is seriously diminished!
Comments from Google Earthers/Mapsters welcome!
Best wishes to all, Ted.
On Sun, 2007-09-23 at 12:48 +0100, Robert Tillyard wrote:
On my version there is an overlay called Digital Globe Coverage (very bottom of the list) that will overlay the date that each area was photographed on.
The Moreton Hall area of Bury is now on 5 July 2003 when it has been more recent as some of the new estates have now disappeared from Google Earth.
I have reason to suspect that those dates are incorrect.
The area near Cullum road also shows 2003 as well, but I am sure the infamous Greene King access road was open before mid 2002 and it was definitely in use by mid 2003. Yet the map shows that the site isn't even cleared.
Also I am pretty sure I looked at a house on the Tayfen development near Kind Edward VI Sch about mid 2003, but again the site isn't even cleared on that map (you can even still see the outline of the Greyhound track)
Maybe that date relates to when the maps were digitised or something, but I am 90% certain it doesn't relate to when they were photographed.
Regards, Rob.
On 23 Sep 2007, at 11:48, (Ted Harding) wrote:
Hi Folks,
This is for people who have been using Google Maps (or equivalently Google Earth, since they seem to use exactly the same sattelite imagery):
http://maps.google.com http://earth.google.com
It's some weeks since I last had a look around using Google Maps, and I did it again last night (with both Earth and Maps). It seems to me that the terrain images used have degraded.
1: They seem to be fuzzier, and with less vivid colour, at the larger zoom levels
2: I'm sure they are older
than they used to be. In particular, the aerial view of my own house used to show a car I owned a few years back parked at the front, from which (and from other vehicles in the neighbourhood) I inferred that the image dated from around 2002 (certainly not before 2001). And the back garden was much as it was when I moved in in 2001: green throughout, with grass and bushes.
Last night, however, there were no bushes in the back garden and at the rear was a large brown, presumably cultivated, area. Now the people before the people before me had a vegetable garden there, which tallies with the image, but the people before me did not (having turned the whole garden over to lawn and shrubs), so that puts the date of the photo over 10 years old.
Although the displayed images state "Copyright 2007", this clearly has nothing to do with the date of the photography.
I'd be a bit miffed if Google had decided to degrade the quality and especially the timeliness of their images! I fairly regularly use it as a resouce for getting an overview of an area, and until now I've relied on the imagery being not more than a few years old. If, as now seems to be the case, it may be over (even well over) 10 years, then the relevance to recent conditions is seriously diminished!
Comments from Google Earthers/Mapsters welcome!
Best wishes to all, Ted.
main@lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!
On Sun, Sep 23, 2007 at 11:48:24AM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:
Comments from Google Earthers/Mapsters welcome!
No idea on your google earth question, but if you have a flash plugin installed then pop over to http://www.flashearth.com/ which uses mapping data from lots of sites and is quite fun.
Adam
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On 23 Sep 2007, at 11:48, (Ted Harding) wrote:
It's some weeks since I last had a look around using Google Maps, and I did it again last night (with both Earth and Maps). It seems to me that the terrain images used have degraded.
1: They seem to be fuzzier, and with less vivid colour, at the larger zoom levels
2: I'm sure they are older
The image above our house has been updated recently (in the last 4 years or so) as it now shows a blue car outside as the previous images were showing a red car. The older images were better quality as well.
On the TV it was said that the closer high res images were taken by normal aerial photography rather than a satellite image as the available satellite images didn't has that level of resolution, but what gets me is that similar quality images are shown for some parts of the world where a plane is likely to get shot at for taking pictures...
John
Just had a look at my home maps--they look a little fuzzier than before, but are definitely newer (looking at the building activity in the neighbourhood I would say about 4 years old). Niels
(Ted Harding) wrote:
Hi Folks,
This is for people who have been using Google Maps (or equivalently Google Earth, since they seem to use exactly the same sattelite imagery):
http://maps.google.com http://earth.google.com
It's some weeks since I last had a look around using Google Maps, and I did it again last night (with both Earth and Maps). It seems to me that the terrain images used have degraded.
1: They seem to be fuzzier, and with less vivid colour, at the larger zoom levels
2: I'm sure they are older
than they used to be. In particular, the aerial view of my own house used to show a car I owned a few years back parked at the front, from which (and from other vehicles in the neighbourhood) I inferred that the image dated from around 2002 (certainly not before 2001). And the back garden was much as it was when I moved in in 2001: green throughout, with grass and bushes.
Last night, however, there were no bushes in the back garden and at the rear was a large brown, presumably cultivated, area. Now the people before the people before me had a vegetable garden there, which tallies with the image, but the people before me did not (having turned the whole garden over to lawn and shrubs), so that puts the date of the photo over 10 years old.
Although the displayed images state "Copyright 2007", this clearly has nothing to do with the date of the photography.
I'd be a bit miffed if Google had decided to degrade the quality and especially the timeliness of their images! I fairly regularly use it as a resouce for getting an overview of an area, and until now I've relied on the imagery being not more than a few years old. If, as now seems to be the case, it may be over (even well over) 10 years, then the relevance to recent conditions is seriously diminished!
Comments from Google Earthers/Mapsters welcome!
Best wishes to all, Ted.
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 23-Sep-07 Time: 11:48:20 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
-
Adam Bower -
John Heaton -
Martijn Koster -
Niels Walet -
Robert Tillyard -
ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk -
Wayne Stallwood