Tiny Pixels: see your house picture satellite photo.

If you live in the States, you can see your house picture satellite photo here. Give this photo satellite search site a go. I tried it on the Golden Gate Bridge, from the California maps and could see individual cars.

If you think that's cool, try the Google Earth software,

or the online version at http://maps.google.com/ It requires a modern computer but will work for anywhere in the world.

To make the details visible on the earth picture, satellite technology requires an unimaginable number of pixels. Probably more than all the weather satellites combined, but who knows.

Satellite Picture from Space?

What is a Pixel?

A tiny point of light serving as the smallest unit used in constructing a video image.

Just like on your computer screen. The word breaks down to picture element, where pix is short for pictures. The house picture satellite example above uses very small sized digital camera pixels compared to the weather equipment described below.

The satellite produces video images as well. That requires enormous environmental data resources.

Each pixel on this display shows a representative temperature or other variable for quite a large area of the planet below. Or at least as far as the sensor can tell.

Though not fine enough to see your house picture satellite depictions from these weather devices work very well for weather. Plus they can distinguish a few smaller features.

A lake, cloud or snow patch for example which is smaller than the pixel will likely change the colour of the entire block slightly, but that is about all. Larger things spanning two or more pixels show even more easily.

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Special duty

This is where the concentration of data comes in to play. Resolution defines the limit of the detail available in any recording, video, audio or otherwise. It can be expressed in scale units such as inch to pixels or kilometres per pixel.

Small objects cannot be resolved, and to see something as little as your house picture satellite equipment needs to be specifically designed for this purpose.

Which weather channel to use

Satellite resolution fluctuates substantially.

For geostationary equipment thousands of miles above the earth, visible light spectrum wavelengths give the best resolution. It's about a thousand metres square on the equator directly below the vehicle.

This minimum size will increase to double (half the resolution) for more distant points on the earth. This device can see about as far as the mid to high latitudes.

The IR infrared and water vapour resolutions are eight and fourteen times worse than visible spectrums respectively. But they still provide valuable information.

The NOAA polar orbiting satellites fly much closer to the planet. They have better resolutions, up to 1 km for all channels. The house picture satellite imagery referred to above uses U.S. Geological Survey data rather than NOAA.

An average home measures about 20 meters long. To clearly see a house picture satellite pixels need to be less than this size, much smaller than what the current weather satellites need.

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