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| Queen Mary bigger in New York than Lisbon |
I've noticed, since I look at maps a lot and do map type things for a living, that observant people have spotted two Queen Marys on Google Earth's imagery. One is in
New York, the other in
Lisbon . In comparing them and noticing how the deckchairs have been carefully rearranged between visits to port, I realised that one of them is about 10% larger than the other. I'm sure that this cannot be covered by tidal discrepancy (no, I haven't done the maths, but we'd be talking at least hundreds, if not thousands of feet of tide to get that kind of difference, but of course when they talk of "Satellite" visualisation, it's probably a combination of satellite and low-level aircraft). So does this mean that Google or their data providers have done a shoddy job with orthorectifying their aerial photography? It's not a major concern, but hoi polloi might be getting quite comfortable with the resolution and accuracy of this imagery, perhaps even contemplating building applications based off it, and we'd hate them to crash their breeder-prams into the sea because of such careless imaging.
Interestingly, looking at the
New York image in more detail, the imagery is tiled and blended, and apparently in a way that takes note of the displayed features rather than just a compass-based orthographic grid. In fact, it would appear that the Lisbon-sized Queen Mary might just have fitted correctly without having to be tucked under the harbour road there.
