Finding the clearest picture of your home and the roads leading to your home on Google Maps is something joyful.
Google has updated its Google Maps and Google Earth with cloud-free, clearest and high-quality images. The fresh new images are from NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite and its being processed by a new technique for sharper images.
Google uses the images from Landsat 8 satellite, which was launched into earth orbit in 2013. It captures images with greater detail, truer colors, and at an unprecedented frequency. The company used a new processing technique to mine nearly a petabyte of Landsat imagery, sorting more than 700 trillion individual pixels to get the high-quality cloud-free pixels.
“To put that in perspective, 700 trillion pixels is 7,000 times more pixels than the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy or 70 times more pixels than the estimated number of galaxies in the Universe.” Chris Herwig, Program Manager, Google Earth Engine explains in a blog post.
Earlier Google used the images from Landsat 7 satellite, which was affected by a hardware failure, resulting in missing data. This forced Google to switch to Landsat 8 – the newest sensor in the USGS/NASA Landsat Program.
The sharper images are already available on Google Maps and Google Earth web and mobile apps. You can check it by turning on the satellite layer in Google Maps.