Baia Sprie from satellite

Friday, May 30, 2008

What you see above is the result of two and a half hours of precise and tiring work. Check it out in original size. But be warned it’s 18.5 megabytes and 5000 x 3526 pixels in resolution.

The story goes something like this: a few weeks ago we were talking at the office about Google Maps and it’s lack of high resolution satellite images of Romania, when a colleague mentioned that there is a Romanian site which has them. I was very skeptical at first but after taking a peek and seeing my hometown and my parent’s house from way above I was hooked. I checked out all the surroundings (streets, friend’s houses, lakes, places we hiked to, etc) and even some places around the country. I spent almost a day on it scrolling like crazy because one can call that site everything except usable. And then I thought I’ll try modifying the HTML frame a bit maybe I can make that map window a bit bigger. At first I failed because I couldn’t really concentrate as I was at work…

But yesterday night after seeing a really beautiful image of Baia Sprie on Flickr I thought I’ll give the whole thing another try. And this time my “hacking” skills payed off. After a few short minutes of tinkering I had a full screen map viewer which I used today to snap various screenshots of the map which I then used as prime material for the “epic” image that’s headlining this post. And I can say that I’m really pleased with the result because basically I can scroll around freely and practically relive the 25 years I stayed there. Hehe.

An annotated version is probably coming really soon… :)