Fun with Google Maps

If you haven't tried it yet, Google Maps is a fun toy to play with. It allows you to zoom in and out of a map view pretty dynamically, and allows you to scroll to adjacent areas without refreshing the whole screen. The most fun, though, is switching between the street map view and a satellite photo of the same area.

I can tell about when some of the satellite pictures were taken. For example, in our area, the houses in the tract west of us are complete, though there's still some construction in one area. The townhouse areas south of Bilter shows only a cleared area and the street, no buildings. And there's no sign at all of the outlet mall a mile from us that opened in May 2004. The fields to the east of our subdivision are just dirt, but the lawns looks like they're greenish. So, the pictures were probably early spring of 2002. Different areas will from different times, for example if I look at the view of Missouri Valley I see the remains of snow on the ground.