Space Art

Tom got to go to FOOcamp last year, and one of the fun on-the-fly FOO projects was to create some art visible from space (or wherever it is the Google satcams hang out: subspace?). So here it is:

Space Invaders.. from space. Genius! There's a Cylon raider there too, but that's in another picture...

Comments

[Erik]

What is often assumed to be “satellite” photography is often shot by airplanes. That is the case with the image above. The resolution is much higher then anything commercially available from a satellite. For comparison, aerial photography can reach resolutions of less then three inches per pixel. That is, each pixel of the images represents less then three inches on the ground. Commercial satellite photography can produce resolutions of about 1 meter per pixel, which would leave the space invaders looking more like specks of dust.

[bob]

Too bad they didn't make them big enough to actually be visible from satellite (they're just big enough to register as a couple white dots). The idea is feasible, however. They just needed to make everything at least 20 times bigger. I don't know how often Google updates the images, so it might have to sit there for a few years- I notice that even in major urban areas, it can take more than a year to update photos.

(B.T.W. All satellites are most definitely in *space.* By convention, space begins 100 kilometers above the Earth. One of the satellites Google uses is 681 kilometers up, which would put it in _Low_ Earth Orbit.)