If anyone ever wondered to see how the how his/her home looks from an aerial view, like an aircraft or a satellite, different companies like Google, GeoEye and Fourmilab have made it possible. Though normal satellite images are quite expensive if you directly approach them, but the maps and aerial view provided by Google are free, quite good enough to locate your home efficiently, and are readily available on the internet. So, if you want to have an aerial view of your home, internet is the best option.
There are a number of applications available that can allow you to see stored satellite images for reference. Some of these applications which can be used freely are –
1. Google Maps – It’s the easiest way for viewing free satellite images, and provides aerial view of almost all the places on earth. It is totally free, and just needs an internet connection. It can even allow up to street level images, also popularly known as Google Street View. And searching for places is quite easy as well; you just need to put an address in the search bar. Otherwise you can put a nearby landmark, which is more probable to be tagged and can be found easily. And then you can drag to your specified location, and can zoom in, out etc.
2. Google Earth – This is another application made available by Google. Again, this is not live satellite image, so it shows the pictures already taken and stored in their database, and can be accessed without connecting to internet. You can get a 3-D rotating image of the earth, where you can point and click to go to any particular place, and zoom in.
3. Fourmilab – This is available for free, enabling you to see the aerial view of your home. Though this is not as good as Google, but has some features like positioning using latitude and longitude. As they use their own group of satellites for the aerial view, so it allows changing the satellite to see how it looks it from another satellite.
The softwares mentioned above show stored images, and are updated after long intervals of time, like a few months to even a year. If you are interested in a live satellite image, GeoEye is the perfect option available. It owns three satellites, allowing getting high resolution image of any corner of the earth. Another option is Mapmart, which stores high quality images of different places on earth, including topographic maps. Though these provide the best aerial view of your home, but they are quite expensive.
Google earth live