Google Earth Used to Find Ancient Roman Villa
cavehobbit writes "Google Earth leads to an archeology find, according to a Nature article. From the article: 'Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river ...' What's buried in your back yard?"
My (parent's) house is in Ketchikan, Alaska. Google Earth just shows a big blurry picture of cloud cover. My friend outside of Fairbanks? Big blur. Vacation cabin in Michigan? Big blur.
I mean, the program is cool and all, but I'm really disappointed that it seems the only places you can see very well are the highly-populated/popular places that there's already lots of established pictures of anyway. I'd really like to be able to explore places I can't easily get to otherwise.
I have no idea if they plan to fix this or if anyone even bothers taking high-res pictures of places that aren't militarily interesting (or whatever criteria they use) but so far the program just seems to be a "hey, I can see my own house in the big city" novelty.