Microsoft's Terraserver
Dateline: 07/06/98The Internet's largest database has recently opened for business and it should prove to be quite popular. Microsoft's Terraserver contains 1,400 gigabytes (1.4 terabytes) of satellite images of most of the United States and populated areas of Europe, and some areas of Asia.
The online resolution of these images is one meter, which means that individual objects such as houses, buildings, and cars are identifiable. You should be able to identify your own house but you won't be able to see your neighbor's dog. The images are not real-time, they are usually a few years old and many are as old as a decade. Personally, I was only able to see my neighborhood being built.
This site allows users to access images through a variety of ways. By visiting the Terraserver homepage, you'll be provided a world map with green blotches showing the area where images are available. Clicking the map yields larger scale maps until you get to the appropriate scale for the images to appear and the green-spotted map to disappear. Zooming further on the images eventually yileds the fuzzy one-meter resolution. However, I don't recommend this technique.
Use one of the many sites available in my Latitude & Longitude category of Net Links to determine your town's latitude and longitude.
Once you have a latitude and longitude, click "Find a Spot on Earth" at the Terraserver site. Enter your latitude and longitude into the form and you'll be taken directly to images of that location. If your location does not have associated images, you'll receive an error message.
The Terraserver database is surprisingly fast and very fun to use though some images are not pieced together very well. The images come from United States Geological Survey Orthophotoquads as well as images from the Russian Space Agency.
The 1,400 GB of data in the database represents more than all of the HTML documents on the entire Internet. Terraserver is quite amazing.
If you have questions, comments, or tips on using Terraserver, post your comments on the Geography Bulletin Board and tell us what you think or what you found.
Happy browsing!
