thoughts on computing

Over the past few years it has been a lot of fun to work with the great folks at GeoEye , so on what is certainly a historic day I want to help them show off a bit of the capabilities of their newest satellite, GeoEye-1.

Despite a bit of wispy cloudcover, GeoEye announced today that they were able to capture a cool image of the crowd at today’s inauguration of the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Both of these are crops from the whole image, which can be downloaded directly from GeoEye.

This half-meter resolution image of the United States Capitol, Washington D.C. was collected by the GeoEye-1 satellite on Jan. 20, 2009 to commemorate the Inauguration of President Barack Obama. The image, taken through high, whispy white clouds, shows the masses of people attending the Inaugural Celebration.

As mentioned, the original image can be found here on the GeoEye site.

But Wait, There’s More
If have you haven’t yet had a chance to play around with Photosynth, by all means take a bit of time and prepare to be fascinated.

In any case, GeoEye also contributed this image to a Photosynth 3d mosaic of the inauguration that you can find (and play around with) here.

VentureBeat posted a few more images as well, and CNET did likewise here.

One final thought: keep in mind that as cool as these images are, GeoEye-1 is capable of far better!