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Did you zoom in? When I zoom in on one of the major intersections and look at the cars, it looks about right. Half-meter resolution means that each car should

Did you zoom in? When I zoom in on one of the major intersections and look at the cars, it looks about right. Half-meter resolution means that each car should be several blurry pixels wide, and that's what I get.

alberth 4y ago
When I zoom into my property, a Google logo is display. So I assume they are sourcing from them.
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- qwertox 4y ago
  The explorer is actually Google Maps. It looks like they are using it for you to have a tool to select the area that interests you. Maybe there should be a disclaimer.
7ewis 4y ago
I zoomed in, was also disappointed. Don't know the use case for these photos, but when you compare it to the quality of say a drone photo, SkyFi is nowhere near as good. I'm sure there must be a market for these photos, but for most people I think a drone is probably better and more cost effective.
- lukefischer 4y ago
  we have drone partnerships, airplane, stratospheric balloons, etc and are just STARTING with satellites. Drone imagery is better but a problem of scale but we are trying to solve that. Think of it not as photos but more so of data....we could never list the complete use cases here because there are so many
- alberth 4y ago
  > but when you compare it to the quality of say a drone photo Comparing a satellite/plane photo to a drone is apples to oranges. There’s no way to scale a business in providing global drone level coverage. Now there are services that fly planes with high res imagery that can get down to ~20cm. And even these business are super difficult to scale.
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- wongarsu 4y ago
  Yes, an image that's taken from three to four orders of magnitude further away is much worse than one taken from close up. Unless you spend a lot on the optics and make the satellite really big. But while the NRO is busy pointing space telescopes at earth, the private sector has so far been more interested in using these images to estimate crop yields over entire countries, or look at how full parking lots of certain companies are. For those use cases it's more useful to launch more lower-cost satellites to get more coverage more frequently, at the expense of quality.

alberth 4y ago

When I zoom into my property, a Google logo is display. So I assume they are sourcing from them.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
qwertox 4y ago
The explorer is actually Google Maps. It looks like they are using it for you to have a tool to select the area that interests you. Maybe there should be a disclaimer.

7ewis 4y ago

I zoomed in, was also disappointed. Don't know the use case for these photos, but when you compare it to the quality of say a drone photo, SkyFi is nowhere near as good. I'm sure there must be a market for these photos, but for most people I think a drone is probably better and more cost effective.

lukefischer 4y ago
we have drone partnerships, airplane, stratospheric balloons, etc and are just STARTING with satellites. Drone imagery is better but a problem of scale but we are trying to solve that. Think of it not as photos but more so of data....we could never list the complete use cases here because there are so many
alberth 4y ago
> but when you compare it to the quality of say a drone photo Comparing a satellite/plane photo to a drone is apples to oranges. There’s no way to scale a business in providing global drone level coverage. Now there are services that fly planes with high res imagery that can get down to ~20cm. And even these business are super difficult to scale.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
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wongarsu 4y ago
Yes, an image that's taken from three to four orders of magnitude further away is much worse than one taken from close up. Unless you spend a lot on the optics and make the satellite really big. But while the NRO is busy pointing space telescopes at earth, the private sector has so far been more interested in using these images to estimate crop yields over entire countries, or look at how full parking lots of certain companies are. For those use cases it's more useful to launch more lower-cost satellites to get more coverage more frequently, at the expense of quality.