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Microsoft parts clouds over Bing Maps with massive sat pic upgrade

Adds ocean floor detail too

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

Microsoft has jazzed up Bing Maps with an extra 13 million square kilometers of high-res satellite shots and ocean floor imagery.

Oahu, Hawaii before and after Maps update

Oahu, Hawaii before and after Maps update

Ballmer and co have sourced data about the ocean's bathymetry - the underwater equivalent of topography - from Scripps Institution of Oceanography as well as new “straight down” photos taken from aircraft or satellite.

The satellite pictures have a resolution of 15 metres per pixel and will be stuffed into Bing Maps and the Windows 8 Maps app.

“Our new base satellite layer is analyzed and processed to provide views with reduced cloud cover in areas notorious for persistent cloud cover such as high latitude and equatorial regions. More detail is now visible in these once problematic areas,” the firm explained on the Bing Maps blog. ®

Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

Re: Bing Maps?

Bing ALSO has the entire suite of Ordinance Survey maps...very useful.

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Curious fact

With this ever-increasing level of detail and sophistication to mapping the entire world's surface it is odd that the first thing anyone does with it is to take a look at the outside of the building they're currently sitting inside.

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Loving the time travel

As I zoom in, I can see the builders vans that filled the site in 2011. Another level of zoom and zap! they are gone, the extension is gone...

Out again. Oooo it's back.

Feels like I have my own personal cloaking system :-)

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