satellite image

Time-lapse images let you witness 28 years of Earth's changes

A newly released series of dramatic time-lapse satellite images, available at Google's Timelapse Web site, shows just how quickly the world's landscapes have changed in the last 28 years.

The pictures, captured by the series of Landsat satellites and released in conjunction with the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA, and Time magazine, show several startling examples of how humans and natural processes have changed Earth from 1984 to 2012. You'll see the depressing decline of the Columbia Glacier in Alaska, the blossoming of Dubai's epic cityscape, and Las Vegas' urban explosion. There's also an alarming look at the deforestation occurring in the Brazilian Amazon forest. … Read more

Clouds ruin GeoEye's satellite image of inauguration

Aw, shucks: imaging company GeoEye could not capture a super high-resolution image of Obama's inauguration today from space.

Using its GeoEye-1 and IKONOS satellites positioned 423 miles above the Earth, the company tried and failed -- due to clouds -- on two separate attempts to capture the image of the inauguration, a GeoEye representative told CNET. GeoEye planned to release an interactive map of the ceremony with a built-in zoom and a slider that would have let the user compare this year's image to the one captured four years ago. Feel free to zoom around in the 2009 Inauguration image embedded below.… Read more

Bing Maps adds 165TB of new images of Earth

Bing is now offering 165 terabytes of new birds-eye-view satellite shots of locations all over the Earth, from the Moroccan Mountains to Egypt's pyramids of Giza to the Extraterrestrial Highway in the U.S.

This is Microsoft's mapping engine's largest satellite data release ever. Before today, Bing Map's total amount of data was 129TB. So, what can be seen on the search engine's maps has now more than doubled in size.

"This release features imagery over North America, South America, Africa, Australia, Europe and Asia," Bing wrote in a blog post today. "… Read more

Princeton researchers use satellite images to track disease

Tracking where humans migrate and cluster in any given country from season to season is, in some places, a tall order. Which makes tracking the risk of infectious disease outbreaks that thrive in dense populations tricky as well.

Satellite images of nighttime lights could be the answer, according to researchers at Princeton, who report on their findings today in the journal Science.

Using nighttime images taken of Niger's three largest cities between 2000 and 2004 by a U.S. Department of Defense satellite, and checking those images against public health records compiled by Niger's Ministry of Health, they … Read more

Satellite images show Japan before and after quake

It's a startling picture of how dramatic and destructive Friday's massive earthquake actually was.

The quake, which was upgraded today to a magnitude 9.0 by the Japan Meteorological Agency, may have shifted the position of Earth's axis about 6.5 inches, Richard Gross, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the Los Angeles Times. The quake likely sped up the Earth's rotation, shortening the day by 1.8 microseconds, Gross said. Also, the main island of Japan appears to have moved 8 feet, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey told CNN.

To … Read more

Satellites, balloons, and math used to count inauguration crowd

U.S. President Barack Obama was sworn in on Tuesday in Washington. But the number of people who braved the frigid D.C. weather to watch the historic event could have been anywhere between 800,000 and 3 million, depending on who you talk to.

Researchers have projected widely varying figures for the event's attendance, based on satellites circling above the clouds, aerostat balloons tethered blocks away, television coverage of the crowd, and good old-fashioned mathematics calculations.

Steve Doig, a journalism professor at Arizona State University who specializes in crowd counting, said he is estimating there were 800,000 … Read more