8 replies to this topic

[Dennis McClendon]

I want to do a page-sized map of the Chicago region (we'll say an area 150 km x 150 km) that has as a backdrop aerial imagery. The stuff you see at Bing's satellite view is pretty much exactly what I'm looking for. But, of course, it's not copyright-free and I'm not even sure how to try to purchase it. The USGS Seamless coverage is great, but it seems like it would take me weeks to download tiny little sections and piece them together. What really obvious solution am I completely overlooking for getting aerial imagery at such a small scale?

[David Medeiros]

What really obvious solution am I completely overlooking for getting aerial imagery at such a small scale?

Weather balloon and a camera?

Sorry, I don't have a serious answer for you. In fact I am here to ask the very same question but for Northern California (Sacramento River Watershed). Tried the seamless server and found it too buggy for reliable service plus the tiles are huge memory hogs.

[Crischan]

page sized, 150x150km? well, probably a Landsat image would do the job. They are at 30m pixel resolution which should give about 600dpi for an 20cm wide page:

150km / 30m = 5000 pixels
5000 pixel / 20cm *2.54 cm/inch = 635 pixels per inch

And you can get Landsat imagery free of charge!

[SteveR]

The new USGS Beta orthophoto quads may work for both of you.

http://store.usgs.gov/b2c_usgs/usgs/maploc...ea=%24ROOT)/.do

The current coverage is shown in black on the above link. These have 1 meter per pixel resolution, but are in PDF. This means the images will have to be transformed to useable images from Photoshop or Acrobat. The text and grid are in separate layers and can be deactivated.

[Matthew Hampton]

I took a look and I think you can get the exact tile Microsoft uses for $100. They get their data from Earthstar Geographics and it looks like you can order a single Terracolor 5 x 6 degree tile.

Chicago would be on tile N40-W090.

[frax]

Dennis - if you have ArcGIS you can get that imagery directly in Arc - I assume that you are licensed to use the imagery in your projects.

[Dennis McClendon]

Dennis - if you have ArcGIS you can get that imagery directly in Arc - I assume that you are licensed to use the imagery in your projects.

Can you be a little more explicit about how to "get that imagery directly in Arc?" Thanks.

Matthew, thanks for the Earthstar tip.

[frax]

Dennis - I haven't used this yet, so I don't know the details of it, but it requires ArcGIS 9.3.1 - for more information, turn here.

[MapMedia]

Dennis - if you have ArcGIS you can get that imagery directly in Arc - I assume that you are licensed to use the imagery in your projects.

Can you be a little more explicit about how to "get that imagery directly in Arc?" Thanks.

Matthew, thanks for the Earthstar tip.

You can goto this ESRI data site, Click on 'Open ready to use basemap: ArcMap' and it will load it into ArcMap. Then you can copy/paste layer into your Arcmap project.