Google announced that they’re going to limit the resolution of aerial photos of certain parts of Israel, to protect any areas that might house military installations:
Google currently offers satellite photos of eight locations in Israel: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, the Dead Sea, Masada, the Dimona Nuclear Research Center (DNRC), Sdot Micha (listed as a nuclear weapons base), the Kinneret, and the Mizpe Ramon crater.
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I gotta tell you that the Google Earth software is fantastic, but the A7 story has lost some of it’s juice and you can tell that it was [originally] written by someone unfamiliar with the program itself (A7 only picked it up from somewhere else).
From what I can tell, the whole area of Israel, Jordan, as well as England for instance, has really crappy resolution, as if the satellite pictures were taken a long time ago. It doesn’t even approach the 2meter limit allowed by the US government, and that’s why this is all a tempest in a teacup. Britain has fantastic free mapping software on the net with much better resolution (I think mapquest?), so perhaps it’s also a matter of Google purchasing newer imagery – these pictures cost money of course. Google claims that it will be updating the imagery at least every year and a half.
So the resolution might be crap, but one of the most amazing things is still he ability to fly over Israel and use the topography. The software allows you to choose an altitude and tilt the picture as well. You can choose how fast you scroll/’fly’, and it’s just as if you are in a propeller or jet plane flying through the arava from Eilat, around the Judean hills or crash into the Hermon. Awesome!
Only recommended with a fairly new PC with high-speed connection.
Nice picture of Israel here (D1m0na included): http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/deadsea_etm_1999219_lrg.jpg
hanukah sameach,
google is great but they dont really have much choice. i ve read an article few days ago that us government allows comercial sale of satelite imaging as long as few rules are obeyed and one of them (according to that article) is that only low-resloution images of israel would be published.
G-d bless Google!
cool beans