In case you missed it, Google Earth now has a "clouds free" view of our planet.
The satellite imagery is usually created like a quilt; it's made by stitching together imagery of different parts of the world. In this case, Google has used USGS's and NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite—sometimes dozens of photos of a single spot in the world—and pulled together the images to prduce a clear view of every place, even in tropical regions that are always at least partly cloudy.
The result is a single, beautiful 800,000 megapixel image of the world, which can be seen in both Google Earth and Maps when you're zoomed out to the global view. This image is so big, if you wanted to print it at a standard resolution of 300 dots per inch you’d need a piece of paper the size of a city block!
Awfully pretty, and I thought you might enjoy seeing it. Note that we haven't removed clouds from ALL images at ALL scales--just at the largest one (and little by little, we're improving the other views as well).
To get your own, go to Google Earth and zoom out.
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| Papua New Guinea, with and without clouds. |
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