Google Maps introduces HD satellite imagery from Landsat 8 – Enjoy the view!

Image courtesy: Google

New Delhi: Google Maps is probably one of the most useful apps you have on your phone. It's accurate and provides you with great images when you have to search for places.

Now, Google has decided to treat Google Maps users to an imagery upgrade! Yes, you heard that right!

Say hello to fresh, high resolution, high definition images coming to you directly from Landsat 8 satellite. The earlier version used Landsat 7.

In a blog post, Google says that to obtain such images, it looked at millions of imaging and used new processing techniques to come up with the new cloud-free, seamless version.

According to Google, Landsat 8 is capable of capturing twice as many images as Landsat 7 does every day.

In the blog post, Google wrote, “Like our previous mosaic, we mined data from nearly a petabyte of Landsat imagery—that’s more than 700 trillion individual pixels—to choose the best cloud-free pixels. To put that in perspective, 700 trillion pixels is 7,000 times more pixels than the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, or 70 times more pixels than the estimated number of galaxies in the Universe.”

Landsat 8 is an American Earth observation satellite that was launched in February 2013. It is the eighth satellite in the Landsat program and the seventh to make it to the orbit successfully.

The new imagery is now available across all Google mapping products.