Sources have stated that The Google Company has deployed new imagery from NASA’s Landsat 8 observation satellite in Google Maps and Google Earth, Program Manager Chris Herwig wrote in blog post Monday. What this basically amounts to is much crisper imagery when you’re using the “satellite” function on Google Maps, which shows locations as they would appear in real life.
It is said that the difference is actually substantial. Google has offered two satellite images of New York City to showcase the change. It’s a night and day difference and we have to move the slider in the middle to see for you.
Herwig has written that 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.
It is stated that getting clear photographs involves a lot of data and they have mined data from nearly a petabyte of Land sat imagery that’s more than 700 trillion individual pixels to choose the best cloud-free pixels.
