By contrast, imagery of downtown Jerusalem is always significantly blurrier you can just barely make out cars parked on the side of the road.Īs I explained in my previous piece about geolocating Israeli Patriot batteries, a 1997 US law known as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment (KBA) prohibits US companies from publishing satellite imagery of Israel at a Ground Sampling Distance lower than what is commercially available. Downtown Toronto, for example, is always visible at an extremely high resolution looking closely, you can spot my bike parked outside my old apartment. The areas of these blurred sites range from large complexes-such as airfields or munitions storage bunkers-to small, nondescript buildings within city blocks.Īlthough blurring out specific sites is certainly unusual, it is not uncommon for satellite imagery companies to downgrade the resolution of certain sets of imagery before releasing them to viewing platforms like Yandex or Google Earth in fact, if you trawl around the globe using these platforms, you’ll notice that different locations will be rendered in a variety of resolutions. Yandex Maps-Russia’s foremost mapping service-has also agreed to selectively blur out specific sites beyond recognition however, it has done so for just two countries: Israel and Turkey. In similar fashion, an old Dutch law requires Dutch companies to blur their satellite images of military and royal facilities-even to the point where a satellite imagery provider once doctored an image of Volkel Air Base after it was purchased by FAS’ very own Hans Kristensen. France, for example, has asked Google to obscure all imagery of its prisons after a French gangster successfully conducted a Hollywood-inspired jailbreak involving drones, smoke bombs, and a stolen helicopter(!)-and Google has agreed to comply by the end of 2018. Google Earth occasionally does this at the request of governments that want to keep prying eyes away from some of their more sensitive military or political sites. It also has driving directions, and all kinds of features that you can turn on and off to give you more information – like local sightseeing highlights.Want to know how to make a satellite imagery analyst instantly curious about something? You can zoom in and out, and type in a specific address anywhere on Earth to go right there. This is a web-based tool that lets you browse around satellite photos of the Earth. So how can you use these images? The easiest tool to use is Google Maps. This commercial satellite blasted off on September 6, 2008, and is capable of resolving images on the Earth down to a size of 0.41 meters. Google has an exclusive contract with a company called GeoEye, which recently launched their GeoEye-1 satellite. These images come from NASA satellites, USGS aerial surveys, and satellite photos from commercial operators. Instead, they use images from a variety of sources and store them on their servers. Google doesn’t actually have a satellite of their own. But is there a Google satellite to take these photographs? Both of these tools allow you to see a satellite view of the Earth, and zoom right in to see your home from space. If you’ve spent any time on the internet, you’ve probably had a chance to use either Google Earth or Google Maps.
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