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Charlotte Google Maps Update

peaceloveunderstanding

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ScottCLT Burg

ScottCLT

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I don't know where to post this, or if I should, but Google Maps has done a big update for the Charlotte satallite view.

Check it out! The difference is astounding, especially uptown and in South Park. There's lots of red dirt all around the city.

Cool...unfortunately they haven't updated the picture yet on Google Earth. Still no 3D buildings on Google Earth either.

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dubone Megalopolis

dubone

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Very cool! This is our first sat images with Imaginon, the Arena, Courtside in it. Plus it has Avenue, Trademark, and Epicentre under construction.

I'm glad they updated them. So much has happened in the last few years, and the only one that even had the arena under construction was yahoo, but theirs were fuzzy.

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AuLukey Town

AuLukey

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Man, for it being up to date, it really isn't all that up to date. There isn't a drop of concrete on the Epicentre lot. Basing it off of the Epicentre webcam, this image is back from anywhere between January and March. But, I’ll take it over the old convention center that still shows up on Google Earth.

That being said, that could explain why University City looks to be unchanged. Based on a February timeframe, the track was still there until late April. It's hard to tell exactly because it was around April when that new apartment complex on Berkeley Place Dr and it still looks well under construction in that shot. So, I believe that UC was updated along with the rest of Charlotte.

Looking up towards the Concord Mills area, it can clearly be seen it was not touched. The recently finished Convention Center and Embassy Suites Hotel is just a dirt lot in the satellite imagery.

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sfmartin Whistle-Stop

sfmartin

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Google gets the images from the county and the county only produces 1 a year - and it's usually a year behind. They have to do quite a bit to the images to rectify them, merge them, sharpen them, etc. which is why they don't do it more often and why it takes so long to publish them.

Oh yeah, they take the photos in the winter during leaf-off, so Jan-Feb is a good bet.

Oh yeah 2, it is aerial photography - from planes, not satellites.

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peaceloveunderstanding Town

peaceloveunderstanding

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Google gets the images from the county and the county only produces 1 a year - and it's usually a year behind. They have to do quite a bit to the images to rectify them, merge them, sharpen them, etc. which is why they don't do it more often and why it takes so long to publish them.

Oh yeah, they take the photos in the winter during leaf-off, so Jan-Feb is a good bet.

Oh yeah 2, it is aerial photography - from planes, not satellites.

Yea, but the little button says 'Satellite'.

I wish they would have taken the pictures in the summer or late spring! Everything looks so dreary and brown.

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crispin Whistle-Stop

crispin

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M Street looked finished to the sky by January. They are still doing a whole lot inside, and on the facades, but the parking lots, and the basic structures were there, and would look mostly finished from the air.

So the Google pictures show Courtside with its roof on, and a grassy field where M Street is. When was that moment?

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dubone Megalopolis

dubone

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Courtside topped off July, 2005, and that was just the structure. This aerial shows up with the facade of Courtside, so it must have been some months after 7/05.

I have pictures of M-Street starting construction Sept/Oct of 2005. The framing for the building along 7th was mostly there by mid October.

This seems very strange. There basically would not have been a fall or winter time frame where M Street wasn't started, and Courtside looked finished from the outside. Possibly they are composite images, with only closer to Tryon being updated.

It seems most likely to be a composite, as the Epicenter site did not look like it shows on Google before at least mid October, when I know M Street was started. I'm tracing through the images from 210 Trade's webcam now.

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dubone Megalopolis

dubone

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Ok. So based on a comparison with the the 210 Trade Webcam, and the Google Maps image of the site.

It was midday on January 27.

Here is the Oxblue webcam pic from 1/27/06 at 11:47 next to the Google Maps pic of Epicentre. If you browse around to the next day, there were changes enough that they won't match.

M Street was definitely not a grass field on January 27.

post-670-1157822010_thumb.jpg

post-670-1157822010_thumb.jpg

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AuLukey Town

AuLukey

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The only thing that makes it not seem like a composite image is that all of the shadows are going in the same direction.

All that means is that they were taken at the same time of day which is very possible. If anybody has Google Earth, look at the corner of W 9th and N Church St. The buildings all have the same shadow direction, yet some of them are taken from different prospectives. I don't feel like looking for other examples of this, but it proves that downtown on Google is comprised of at least a couple different composite images taken at the same time of day.

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AuLukey Town

AuLukey

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Mapmart is a site with aerial photography of the entire country. While most of the outskirts are only in black in white, all of Charlotte's areas, as well as the burbs were in color and you could look as close as a particular street and make out the difference in sizes of cars, it was really detailed. Here are a few shots I was able to save from the site from back in 2004 when I found it:

My parents' house in Concord:

momandpopscars.gif

Downtown with labels provided by site:

upclosedowntown.gif

My old apartment complex:

werebeingwatched.gif

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sfmartin Whistle-Stop

sfmartin

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This seems very strange. There basically would not have been a fall or winter time frame where M Street wasn't started, and Courtside looked finished from the outside. Possibly they are composite images, with only closer to Tryon being updated.

Hmmm, I'm not sure about start dates on projects and I'll certainly defer to you guys on that, but the county doesn't make composite images from different seasons - they are composite images in the sense that the plane makes multiple passes taking multiple, overlapping images and all those are mosiaced together, but all from the same general time - those are almost certainly from the same day if not the same image frame. I don't see Google investing the time to mosiac diffferent years images either. I tried looking on the GIS dept page at charmeck.org, but they don't have much in the way of metadata and they don't even list the 05 imagery yet.

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