I find the maps they make really pretty, but the technical stuff doesn't quite deserve the hype. This seems like blue marble, which NASA did in 2005 (and every month since).
That said it should yield a dataset with twice the resolution of Blue Marble, which is cool. The size of a pixel will be 250m, i.e. a small town will be 2 pixel, as opposed to 1 pixel.
For high resolution imagery, you'd need to pay. There is 0.5m data out there, for about $5+ a kilometer, and I'd love NASA to dump a whole world data-set of this. But until then, I think Google and ESRI are safe.
Blue Marble was a big inspiration here, and we’ve had fun comparing notes with some of the people who made it. Blue Marble is, however, ten years old, and has a number of (justifiable) limitations. You can get a sense of these if you zoom in on its depictions of, say, the Niger Delta, or the northern tip of Greenland.
What has been lacking in the past is an open source type effort to make derived datasets available. There are numerous commercial projects that process public domain data and resell it, but do not publish methods or make the data available for free. The community tend to use NASA datasets with known limitations, or commercial data with high entry pricing. There is a distinct lack of cost-free domain specific derived data.
Comments
I find the maps they make really pretty, but the technical stuff doesn't quite deserve the hype. This seems like blue marble, which NASA did in 2005 (and every month since).
That said it should yield a dataset with twice the resolution of Blue Marble, which is cool. The size of a pixel will be 250m, i.e. a small town will be 2 pixel, as opposed to 1 pixel.
For high resolution imagery, you'd need to pay. There is 0.5m data out there, for about $5+ a kilometer, and I'd love NASA to dump a whole world data-set of this. But until then, I think Google and ESRI are safe.
VERY LARGE FILE http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/73000/7375... NASA's blue marble.
Blue Marble was a big inspiration here, and we’ve had fun comparing notes with some of the people who made it. Blue Marble is, however, ten years old, and has a number of (justifiable) limitations. You can get a sense of these if you zoom in on its depictions of, say, the Niger Delta, or the northern tip of Greenland.
What has been lacking in the past is an open source type effort to make derived datasets available. There are numerous commercial projects that process public domain data and resell it, but do not publish methods or make the data available for free. The community tend to use NASA datasets with known limitations, or commercial data with high entry pricing. There is a distinct lack of cost-free domain specific derived data.
Blue marble is half the resolution MapBox is aiming for and also their goal is a generalized base layer. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5475899]