Hey nice pic Ric .
Got any of those for "up our way"
Warren.

Thats an ASTER image

You can access them from NASA website

see the link from the pick and hack back a bit. They may produce JPG of other areas randomly, not sure

Data is available for all areas but you need imaging software and some knowledge of remote sensing stuff to do it. Often the raw data is huge too - like 200 MB for an image

better to search for already processed existing output jpg images like the sydney one above - these always lose spatial resolution over the original data though, theyre filtered for web hosting etc

ASTER data is from a satellite and has red, green, blue spectral bands at 15m resolutions + many other spectral bands at lower resolutions. So by zooming in you wont see any more, it just gets fuzzy.

No you cant read the newspaper from space using this piece of equipment.

Other similar remote sensing bits of gear are the LandSat and SPOT systems.

both of generally similar resolutions.

Need to use some fancy equipment like Quickbird or other to get to 1-2m resolutions, but images are much smaller in geographic area.

That image is about as good a resolution as they will let us see.

I have a 525mb landsat image of Australia which I use in a mapping program, its not quite as good a resolution as the sydney pic but is still pretty cool.

You can download similar images from https://zulu.ssc.nasa.gov/mrsid/.
But be warned they are between 80 and 200MB in size.
They are also in a format called MrSid which you will need a mapping program to open or I think you can get a pluggin for photoshop or paintshop pro.

Or if you buy the NATMAP RASTER MOSAIC 2003( www.gpsoz.com.au/natmap_2003.htm )it has a couple of maps of Australia plus it comes with the sat image on a second CD and will have viewing software included

ric