It appears Google Earth received a huge update last night (see Google Earth blog). Large areas in Russia, China, Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand etc. have now very high resolution aerial photos, even over rural and desert areas.

See for example the Tunguska Event location in Siberia (60°54'05" N, 101°53'46" E) if there is any fallen trees visible anymore...

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have you seen the google moon and the google mars sites?
they only have strips of the moon and mars at the moment but they are pretty good.

On the Google Mars site they use Viking data for visible light maps and Mars Odyssey IR data for infrared maps... It would be great if they added Mars Global Surveyor images into it, but the high resolution images by MGS tend to suffer from the lack of context.

I don't quite understand what you mean by "strips of the moon" -- the map used on the Google Moon map is an airbrushed map by USGS. Hopefully they replace it with Clementine and Lunar Orbiter data. The current map is more like a joke (try zooming all the way down).

The Google Earth release will be eventually added into the Google Maps site, by the way.

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Interestingly, almost all the places I've visited have now high resolution images. In April, I visited Antalya, Kemer and Pamukkale/Hierapolis in Turkey -- they all have high resolution images now. Before my trip, Kemer wasn't even marked on the map.

An unfortunate exception is Santorini in Greece, which still hasn't got any better resolution.

Krakatau hasn't been improved, either. Looks like the Bear Island between Norway and Spitsbergen isn't on the map at all, even though its place names are marked!

Most of the Main Island in Hawaii is now covered with high resolution images. Mauna Kea summit is also covered -- sadly there's a gap exactly where most of the telescopes are located. Half of one of the Keck telescopes is partly visible. I think the large telescope visible is Subaru Telescope.

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Puerto Rico is one of the places updated, and Arecibo Observatory looks now much better. Surface evelation data fails at that point and shows it as a hill instead of a valley, though.

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Cool! I look forward to being able to zoom fully in on brissie!

Google earth is beyond my laptops capibility...

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Is there any way in Google Earth to tell the date a particular area was imaged on?

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No. That's a function Google Earth really should have.

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Yeah! I've been trying for ages to find the date for my area... they are at least 2yrs old from what I can tell... but my memory of when landmarks changed isn't thtat good...

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I downloaded the new Google Earth 4 beta... There is a new layer called "DG Coverage"... Enable it and you see what places are imaged and when (by whom?) and the cloud cover there. Looks like Google uses mostly images that have 10% or less cloud cover. Oldest high resolution images are from 2002.

Several US states and the whole Germany have high resolution images from other sources.

As usual, looks like that the Northern Europe has been neglected... The few places that have high resolution photos are often cloudy and have been taken in winter in shallow light angles...

On a brighter side, National Geographic content has been updated to include the North America.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
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" Large areas in Russia, China, Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand etc." now in hi-res. Hoo-bl**dy-ray!
When will they get around to hires in Great Britain?

Above a line from the top of Morecambe Bay to Kingston-upon-Hull, it's all misty Celtic (or Cumbrian, or Scots) twilight, except for some major cities. There's not that much there, but a d*mn sight more than in Tunguska, or the great Australian Outback.

Love & Kisses
John

Microsoft Live Local still has higher res images of most of the places I'm interested in. Between that and Google Earth, most places I want to look at are covered.

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Have they updated or are they going to update google maps(satalight)?

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How often are the Google Earth satellite pictures of eg France updated on the internet? Daily? Weekly?

i think that is more like once, ie pictures from 4 years ago, and maybe they'll do it again when they have better ones.

Well, there's no great change, or any change at all that I could spot, to the coverage of Melbourne on the maps I've seen. Have to check out the Microsoft offering.

Nup, nowhere near as good resolution on the Microsoft offering as compared to Google's. Orders of magnitude less precision.

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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer - renowned 19th Century German philosopher.

Oh well.

Just had a look at my house again and it seems that they have lowered the resolution. It's the same images though because that junk car is still sitting in my driveway. Yes, I may be a redneck.

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Well, just checked back just now and there has definitely been an improvement to the resolution of Google Earth over Melbourne and Fiji.

I can only assume this is related to the original update mentioned here, but for whatever reason this update was not immediately accessible at least from where I am - perhaps because what I was looking at was residing cached on a localised server somewhere?

Not sure, but for whatever reason it was delayed, it is definitely fully accessible from Australia now. Fiji is looking really good as well.

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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer - renowned 19th Century German philosopher.

The new hi res images of my area are at least 2 years old. But they´re cool.

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before this update NZ had only one small strip of hires images. Now that same strip is a wonderfully hires shot of clouds.

at least there is now far better coverage of the rest of the country.