Eye Google Earth Through “Gigapxl Photos”

The big Google news today related not so much to the “Earth” part of “Google Earth” but to the new arm of it known as “Sky.”  Sky’s very nifty, to be sure, and deserves all the attention.  Yet there’s also a new “Gigapxl Photos” layer that shouldn’t go unnoticed.

No, I didn’t leave out the vowels – as Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog explains, the layer is part of the Gigapxl Project.  And as the Project’s homepage notes, “It would take a video wall of 10,000 television screens or 600 prints from a professional digital SLR camera to capture as much information as that contained in a single Gigapxl exposure.”

To be less precise, we’re talking about really, really detailed photographs, and pictures of this quality are now scattered throughout Google Earth.

Just fly around the program until you come across a floating image; it’ll align perfectly with the virtual view, but offer much greater detail.  And if that sounds a little strange, Taylor has made a video of the layer in action (he zooms within about four feet of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts).

Again, Gigapxl Photos may not measure up to Sky.  But it’s nonetheless an incredible feature that shouldn’t get overshadowed.