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Low Cost Panoramic Views From 112,000 feet
IgorC writes "Some engineering students at Texas A&M University have just received data gathered from a low cost 6 Mpixels digital camera (a Canon PowerShot S3 IS). Via NASA balloon, the camera flew up some 36 kms for 18 hours while storing more than 1600 images. The group writes: ' We are in our preliminary result discovery phase and patched up some of these frames together to produce several panoramic views from that altitude (the camera was looking down). They are viewable on the GeoCam blog. We intend on porting that information on Google Maps and Google Earth. For those of you who are undergrads and want to do something better, the folks at HASP-LSU will have a call for participants next year in their announcement page.'"
Here in Australia, to the average joe, kms means kilometres and km/s means kilometres per second. Whether this is scientifically correct or not I do not know, nor do I really care to know.
That wouldn't work, would it? If you were looking at the surface of the Earth in real-time, you wouldn't be able to see half of it because of the clouds. That's why Google Earth is such a patchwork.