[LINK] More with google maps - Uluru and Great Wall

[Markus Buchhorn]

At 11:38 AM 3/05/2007, Paul Brooks wrote:
>Markus Buchhorn wrote:
>>Yes, I've spent way too much time myself looking for things like the sites of the 80 treasures series :-). Closer to home though, I do have one unusual find:
>>http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=-35.463252,148.722943&spn=0.00208,0.004206&t=k&z=18&om=1
>>Took a while to work out what had happened here...
>>  
>And what do you suspect did happen, Markus? I hazard a guess its an artifact from different scan times of the R, G and B colour channels.

Basically spot-on. The satellite that takes many of the images for Digital Globe (now a Google company) takes two images in quick succession; a high-resolution pan-chromatic (greyscale) image, followed by a lower resolution colour image (which I think does RGB in one pass, possibly). Hence the VirginBlue coloured shape flying ahead of the well-defined 737 image :-) For static objects, the registration of the two works fine, but for high-speed objects it has some grief. 

Interestingly, most other aircraft in flight look fine. So either it's a different satellite, it happens to be flying at right-angles to the scanlines, or the satellite had a hiccup on the day and the gap between images was much larger than usual. There are at least 2 more examples at Sydney airport on the runways, but nowhere else I've found so far. If anybody finds other examples please let me know.

Cheers,
        Markus