Color Aerials - new in v2.04

[Krein]

Terraserver has added a number of cities to their "Urban" aerial photo coverage.  I discovered that Tucson was among the new cities, and instantly began working on incorporating the new maps into TopoFusion:



Already I have spent hours exploring all of the covered area around Tucson.  Fortunately the coverage includes most of Starr Pass and the Catalinas--even some of the Redington area and Rincons.  This is too much fun.

Not only are they color, they're 4 times more detailed and much more current (2002)!!

Anyway, I just put up the latest build: v2.04, on the beta page.  Please check it out and let us know of any problems or comments!

Here are the cities that are covered:

Albuquerque Amarillo Anchorage Atlanta Baton Rouge Charlotte Chicago Colorado Springs Dallas/Fort Worth Detroit El Paso Fort Wayne Fresno Houston Jackson Knoxville Lexington Lincoln Lubbock Mobile Modesto Montgomery Oklahoma City Orlando Portland, OR Providence Raleigh-Durham Sacramento Saint Louis Seattle Shreveport Springfield,
MA Stockton Tampa/St. Pete Tucson Washington, DC

Other cities are being loaded "constantly" as they receive them from the USGS.  It could be months, or it could be days....

Fortunately, I live in Colorado Springs, which was added as one of the color cities.

These new aerials ROCK!  The detail is amazing.

One problem so far:

The color photos appear to be out of register with the B&W and the topos.  The color photos are shifted about 300 ft SSW.  You can see this best in the switchbacks south of the lake in the attached screen shots which show what I mean.



and

[Krein]

Wow, that is far off.  Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be a bug in TopoFusion, but seems to be Terraserver's problem.  They are off in all of the Colorado Springs area.

I've looked at 4 or 5 other cities (including Tucson) where things are lined up more or less perfectly.  

Why don't you send an email to the support address at Terraserver.  They may be able to fix it quickly.  I'll send one as well.

Sent an email to support@terraserver.com.  Is there another address that also applies?

In any event, I hope they can fix it soon.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Jim

[sanewcomb]

Great addition. However, the Load Maps Tool doesn't work very well. I zoomed out to include the entire Tucson area, clicked on all the boxes for tiles, and it didn't come close to retrieving all of them. It only reported 100,000 tiles for the area, but I suspect it has a lot more at 0.25 meter resolution. Back to the 'ol panning days for now!

[Krein]

Ah, good point.  The batch download code actually shouldn't get any of the urban tiles!  I'll fix it for the next version.

We also will eliminate the "topo only" "aerial only" stuff since we have the tileset selector stuff.  That will be the way to get what tilesets you want.

Thanks for pointing it out.