this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
942 points (99.6% liked)
aww
20089 readers
55 users here now
A place with minimal rules for stuff that makes you go awww! Feel free to post pics, gifs, or videos of cats, dogs, babies, or anything cute and remember to be kind to others.
AI posts must be labeled [AI] in the title and are limited to one per week.
While posting and commenting in this community, you must abide by instance-wide rules: https://mastodon.world/about
- No racism or bigotry.
- Be civil: disagreements happen, but thatdoes not provide the right to personally insult others.
- No SPAM posting.
- No trolling of others.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I did wonder how they could afford so many satellites.
Pretty sure they just buy the imaging from other companies, not fly their own planes. But it seems hard to confirm this. Google Earth refers to "the image provider", which implies Google didn't fly the planes themselves, but just bought aerial imagery which is already collected and used in other industries.
You can generally get a feel for if it's satellite or plane images. You generally aren't making out a cat on a deck for a satellite photo, it's more like a blurry house and that's all you can make out. Satellites are gonna be 100x further away when they take a photo.
If you check at the bottom of the screen, you normally see the sources of the map data and imagery
Satellite imagery seems cheaper than you might think though. I've had SkyFi in my favourites for a while after they sponsored a YouTube video, and they seem to start at $8 per km^2^ for a new photo or $2.50 for a previously taken one.
I just figured they were in on it with the government.