Spy from the Sky

On Google Earth, one can ‘travel’ around the world in a 3D mode by viewing satellite image and aerial photographs. Google Earth has been around for 2 years now and one can download a free version from the website.
http://earth.google.com/

For Brunei the resolution is not great. It probably ranges between 3 to 15 metres per pixel which means it can only resolves objects of 10 to 50 metres in size. With this resolution you can hardly see a car. The stored image is also quite old, at least 3 years old. This is a Google Earth image example of our very own ‘Dubai-like’ construction off the Jerudong beach.

A higher resolution satellite image can be purchase commercially. I purchase a few recently for my work in the Middle East. One can ask for an up-to-date satellite image for the specified area. The resolution of the satellite images varies depending on the instrument used and the altitude of the satellite's orbit. The higher the resolution the more expensive it is. QuickBird collects the highest resolution commercial imagery providing 0.6 metre resolution for black and white and 2.4 meter resolution multispectral images.

A cheaper version which I took is provided by SPOT based in France which use a satellite which orbit over any point on earth within 26 days. They offer a resolution of 2.5 to 5 metres in panchromatic mode and 10 meters in multispectral mode. It costs about US$5,000 for a pan image of about 2,000 square km. For that you could spend about US$25,000 if you want for the whole of Brunei. QuickBird would be 1.5 times more expensive.

In Europe, the resolution is good. This other image is our house in The Hague located just a mile off the Queen’s official residence. The Dutch Government however managed to get Google Earth to blur the image of the Queen’s residence. Not the case for HM palace in Brunei! Somebody should take action on this. You can view the zoom-in image of our house in the very first entry of our blog website.