Aerial View of My House

Ever watch a TV show where they are using real life satellite imagery of a scene before the cops take out the bad guys and think: that is awesome, I want to do that!

Well, thanks to the hard work and communication between the government and large corporations, you can now see a satellite image of your house from your own computer.

The images of your house are taken by expensive satellites that are orbiting the planet right now. The satellites are equipped with incredibly high resolution cameras and lenses that allow them to zoom all the way to your house from space. Older satellites had resolutions of nearly 1km. This means that for every kilometer (.62 miles) would be represented by 1 pixel of data. To put this into perspective and HD monitor has over 2 million pixels!

The latest satellite cameras can take images with a resolutions of less than a meter per pixel, and some of the governed owned satellites have a resolutions of inches per pixel. That means you can get a satellite image of your home and be able to make out every roof tile you have! As the technology gets better the resolutions will increase further, to the point where you can make out people’s faces from space, of course they have to be looking up!

Some satellite imagery is overlaid with other useful information. Streets are commonly overlaid on the images for navigation purposes. It is nice to not only see the route you plan to take, but to see the buildings and scenery. Another common feature is to superimpose weather data onto of the satellite image. The weather data functions just like a normal radar, except instead of a map you can actually see the buildings and terrain that the clouds and rain are over. Many other features such as points of interest, news events, and your current GPS location can be superimposed onto the images.

There has also been quite a bit of controversy over the satellite images. Some countries have tried to ban the use of images of their land in the fear that it could be used to plan malicious attacks against them. Satellite images were said to be used in the terrorist attack in Mumbai. If you try to view American military institutions the images are blurred out, intentionally making it challenging for foreign countries to use these images to their advantage during an attack.