i noticed that a week or two back as well - you used to be able to tell even from quite a wide area view that most of the country (including my gaff) was at horrid old 10-metre scale satellite views (not enough to properly show the roads, some places) with a thermal spectrum & lots of clouds, and only various, somewhat random stretches mostly around airports had good quality aerial views (the remainder, i guess, being overflights of nuclear bunkers or something)
something posessed me to hit the Satellite button again, though - i think i wanted to get an overhead of my workplace, which was under the aerial view zone for birmingham - only to find even those had been massively improved. It's something like a 10cm to the pixel scale now! Good enough that you can actually have a good guess at what any given car is, and people standing up are distinct blobs.
But it is a bit old ... not a hint of the building works at the hospital that were a little in swing once I started there... in fact no evidence of the wierd new junction system a half mile away that's been there since about a year before (from the shots, it was even stranger before). More telling is how there's a fair bit of demolition going on in central birmingham, but no real sign of the final shape of the Bull Ring, let alone any evidence of construction starting. I've been trying to work out when it was - approx year, season, day of the week and time. From the evidence so far i'd say about 2002, spring or autumn, near midday, and a sunday. The traffic is so light, but there's no cars outside my house or on the driveway, which is an odd combo
(suggesting that me & my bro are both off at uni, and mum's out at a "golf lesson" (mucking about at the driving range))
Wierdly, you can almost count the bricks in the driveway, but our disaster of a garden lanscaping attempt is completely invisible? (good thing too, but it would be cool to have a pic of it)
The most awesome thing about it, apart from the voyeuristic element of seeing how many people have swimming pools, and the utter detail of it all (I can take the plan view of the hospital and draw on the individual
rooms..) - is spotting all the little things hidden away that you'd never have known about... random bits of parkland and river flow inamongst suburban decay, shortcuts that could never otherwise be guessed at (car or on foot/cycle), the sheer number of kids playgrounds, scrapyard piles well away from the road or any vantage point, etc.
Oh the chaos this could cause in the.. er.. "right" hands
EDIT: even more date-pinning - the M6 Toll route has been largely bulldozed, but no tarmac has been laid and all the old country routes it disturbed are still intact, with no deviations or cut-offs.
EDIT2: I hereby inaugrate the first UKP google maps treasure hunt.
First person to identify a polo in this with definable reasons as to how they can be fairly sure gets the prize.
First person to tell me where this is gets the other prize.
First person to turn this into a Grand Theft Auto (versions 1 or 2) map gets the secret prize.
http://img448.imageshack.us/img448/9567 ... unt3uq.jpg (200kb)
EDIT3: pants, i briefly had the idea to make an entire thread out of that (it'd be a good game, if you didn't get too obscure), but it looks like they're only updated a select few areas. Oddly, a couple of the small towns around Notts have got beautiful quality; nottingham itself is still on the 10m pixels
(dont go google much)
