Google Earth now a time machine

Good Morning Sir,

That is great news, I don't use DEM, but when looking for Older things and how they might have look, this is big plus...I see lots of other members building magnificent routes, and the one thing that holds them up on completion is not having some of the older Data available......


.Definitely going to put this to use.....I have already put Google Earth on my Computer several years ago, Amazing Mapping App........:p

Appreciate the sharing of your Knowledge.........:cool:
 
Google has put petabytes of satellite data from the last 30+ years into Google Earth, so you can now go back in time. I think this may be a great help to those looking to see what the prototype of their layout may have looked like 30 years ago. The article is at this link: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/google-earth-is-now-a-3d-time-machine/

Yeah, many places of historical significance had this data back to 1945. I did notice that there were a lot more sites covered now. I've been watching Time Team episodes from the 90s and finding them on Google Earth. It must have been very dry at the time as the parch mark lines show up clearly in the 1998 imagery.

William
 
That's cool, thanks for this. The problem is right now things are way too blurry for those locations not on their 'select' list of places such as Dubai. I just looked at my city, Haverhill, MA, and it looks like a low resolution texture.
 
Yeah, I think a clarification is in order: "Subject to resolution at the time." I tried looking at my area of interest as well, circa 1990-2000, and got no resolution whatsoever, just big pixelated blocks. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted... :eek:
 
But that’s the way it was back in the 1990’s, everything was pixelated. The sun was just a square in the sky, car wheels were blocks, roads had jagged edges instead of smooth curves and writing in cursive script was impossible. At least we had coloured pixels by that stage, but if you go back further to the 1980’s, they were just black and white, it was so boring. Still, it was better than in the 1920’s when everything was grey and people had to walk around in a really fast, jerky manner while smoking pipes. You could see them mouthing words, but no sound came out, so you had to guess what they were saying. Proper talking was only invented in the 1930’s. Kids these days don’t know how lucky they are.
 
Memories of Yesteryear are me,,,,,,,

Oh yes! I remember the 90's! It was like Minecraft, or DOS computer games!! :hehe:


Now you did it,

You opened my Cobb Webbed mind, on Minecraft other games....

Started with 386SX machine, (after using Radio Shack TANDY Computer with Basic Language and 6 Herts speed in 1970), running 5 Megs hard drive, about the size of a small Shoe Box, LOL, and 1/4 Meg, not Gig of Memory GPU,,,,,,,Dos 2.0 and no Windows then 1986, if I recall, or 1985....We had no menus either, you had to create Dos Menu's with Batch Files and Basic Language......Oh my Brain is hurting Forester1, and its your Fault......:hehe:

All kidding aside, I now remember, no Cell Phone, just a Pocket Pager for Mr's Blue to call me, and stop at the nearest Public Phone to call Home......

Wow and now look at us.........AI is taking over...........Sky is the limit........:wave:
 
When I first got married there were no cell phones, and our only contact with the office from the woods was by radio, but the office people went home at 5pm, and we often had to stay out late. My new bride would get furious that she had no idea when I might get home and had no way to contact me to see if I was all right. Found that out very soon after the honeymoon!
 
How funny, before I got pager, same thing for me..... I got delayed at work, where I worked 10-12 hrs days..... Occasionally I would forget to call home, then get stuck with traffic, work was not close.... Amazing those days back then....
 
Good news but I think I will wait until they put up the satellite data from the 1880s for one of my projects. :hehe:
 
Good news but I think I will wait until they put up the satellite data from the 1880s for one of my projects. :hehe:

Same here ... Coal and wood burners rule ! That's my project era.

I didn't really look at this Time Machine in detail, but the Google Earth " Historical Imaginary" tab has been there for a few years, letting you go back to low resolution satellite view as early as the 1990's. What's different about this " Time Machine" ?
 
That would be great if we could watch a satellite time machine of the building of the transcontinental railroad! :D
JimDep, apparently the difference is that I was able to get black and white aerial photos of my area of interest back to the 1980s from Google Maps or Google Earth, although they seemed to be gone when I looked again later. None of that is included in this new timeline.o
 
That would be great if we could watch a satellite time machine of the building of the transcontinental railroad! :D
JimDep, apparently the difference is that I was able to get black and white aerial photos of my area of interest back to the 1980s from Google Maps or Google Earth, although they seemed to be gone when I looked again later. None of that is included in this new timeline.o

On Google Earth the application, I too have used the older black and white images as well as some color, depending upon how far I've gone back. I just checked, and some of the older ones from 1985 are now a complete blur so it appear that Google has ruined those too.

When not using GE, I use Historic Aerials instead because it's a bit more useful.

www.historicaerials.com

There are ads and the viewer is a bit small, but you can do other things such as overlaying a topo map on top of a satellite image, or comparing different years. You can copy and paste in geo coordinates from Google Earth so you can snap right into place. Very addicting.

EDIT:

I think I know what the issue is. Google hasn't loaded up all the images for those years and what we have is low resolution thumbnails. Hopefully this is temporary until they get the images loaded up again.
 
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I'm surprised the satellite images weren't clearer back then , more than they are now. ........you know, with more and more heat waves coming off the earth's surface every year. In a few years, it'll be one blurry mess.

Update: I was being sarcastic. Sorry about that.
 
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I'm surprised the satellite images weren't clearer back then , more than they are now. ........you know, with more and more heat waves coming off the earth's surface every year. In a few years, it'll be one blurry mess.

Some of the satellite images are indeed very clear while others are not. I agree with the increase in heat, and sometimes humidity, the imagery may possibly become more blurry.
 
Thanks for the link John. Those were the same photographs I had obtained before, but I got them without the watermarks. Pretty blurry close up, and lacking in detail, but I can probably put together what one mill site looked like, and it had the other one I was looking at as well. Hard to believe these mills were the main income of these small towns for decades, but I can't find any photographs of the mills anywhere! And I was not better, I took no photographs when I worked around them either.
 
Thanks for the link John. Those were the same photographs I had obtained before, but I got them without the watermarks. Pretty blurry close up, and lacking in detail, but I can probably put together what one mill site looked like, and it had the other one I was looking at as well. Hard to believe these mills were the main income of these small towns for decades, but I can't find any photographs of the mills anywhere! And I was not better, I took no photographs when I worked around them either.

You're welcome. I've seen the older photos on GE for places too without the watermarks in my area. Unfortunately, those watermarks on HA obscure the images usually where we want to see a detail, but I'm sure you like myself won't spend the megabucks they want for no watermarks and we'll deal with them instead.

In the past, I too didn't take pictures of a lot of things even when out on my trips through the Midwest. In some ways, it was difficult getting the camera in position to snap a picture as we passed by things, and in other times we were there but not in a good position to get a good picture then either. Out in the west, I saw coal trains coming out of the Powder River, Amtrak Empire Builders pass each other while I was eating lunch at McDonalds, and masses of coal trains in Forsythe yard awaiting train orders. These are only a few I missed and my days of traveling like that are now over so it'll never happen again.

It is unbelievable that an industry that was so important to a region wasn't documented. At least in my area, there are photos of the heyday of some of the big textile mills in operation. You wouldn't believe the mass of tracks and trains all over the place in Lawrence, and Lowell. Today, the tracks are gone, but there are still signs of them everywhere.
 
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