Longer-term timelapses of the surface of our planet can be found on Google Earth Timelapse (or through another weekend project of mine, namely a Twitter bot that posts randomly selected timelapses off it), but what's available there doesn't reach the high resolution of Google Maps (and isn't available for 45-degree views). Download the Zoom Earthapp Scan the QR codewith the camera on your mobile device to get the Zoom Earth app. This kind of imagery looks great wherever skyscrapers are around – say, in New York City:īecause Google regularly removes the oldest available versions, all of this is rather ephemeral – a year from now (which, at the time of writing, was July 2021), the invocations of this tool that have created the GIFs above may yield totally different results. View LIVE satellite images, rain radar, forecast maps of wind, temperature for your location. It's also fun to look at airports and center pivot irrigation fields through the lens this tool provides:Īs an alternative to the usual straight-down imagery, which is great for navigating but obscures the verticality of buildings and structures, Google Maps also provides oblique views shot at a 45-degree angle – from all of the four cardinal directions – for many urban areas. There's usually two or three different views of any given area available in the "version history", which can yield neat 3D effects (the attributes contain the invocations used to generate them):įor areas of the world that have changed significantly recently, flipping through the imagery versions is almost like a timelapse – consider the port of Beirut before and after the 2020 explosion on the left, or the perpetually-over-budget-and-behind-schedule construction of the new Stuttgart central station on the right. Scroll down to learn how to set it up on your machine, or stay up here for some examples. Um die Satellitenansicht in der Google Maps-App als Standardansicht festzulegen, öffnet ihr nach dem Start der App per Fingertipp auf euer Konto-Bild zunächst das Menü. This weekend project is based on ærialbot, a previous weekend project of mine. Built by the Google team for developers everywhere. Create real-world, real-time experiences with the latest Maps, Routes, and Places features from Google Maps Platform.
Keep this in mind if you use Google Maps with a mobile data connection. Build awesome apps with Google’s knowledge of the real world. Satellite View will also be enabled during turn-by-turn navigation.
This Python-based tool automatically crawls its way through these versions, figuring out which provide unique imagery and downloading it for a user-defined (that's you! you get to define things!) area, eventually assembling it in the form of a GIF. Before we enable Satellite View by default, you should know that it will use more data than the minimalist 'Map' view. The folks maintaining Google Maps regularly update the satellite imagery it serves its users, but outdated versions of the imagery are kept around for a year or two. Its just one of a new wave of satellites designed to zero in on methane gas sources around the world.