Posts Tagged ‘satellite map’
Latest View
It happened by accident. This week Cyndie unintentionally sent me a text of her location. We were involved in a text conversation on an unrelated subject when I received the surprising reply. Curious, I tapped the screen for more information. In the background I could see an image of our property and recognized immediately that it was a recent satellite view showing the gravel driveway around the hay shed we put up the first year we were here.
Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out the navigation to give me a full view. Since I have been anxiously awaiting the Google map view to get updated, I decided to check that for comparison.
Nope. Still the old view from before we bought this place. I checked the view from Bing. Still old. Next I contacted our son, Julian, for his insight on the apple map app. I had thought it was just on iOS devices, but he clarified that it was on my laptop, as well. He provided a link to the view of our address.
There it was, plain as day. I can hardly stop looking at it. Finally, I can see our fence lines, the paddocks, the new hay shed and added driveway, new sand in the round pen, the gazebo, and even our cherished labyrinth. The bright red pickup truck stands out, too, but the biggest treat is seeing the 4 horses out grazing.
I’m posting an old mock-up of the possibilities we were considering before even starting to install new fence, to provide a reference for comparison with the latest view.
I can tell the new view was taken sometime last summer, close enough to autumn that some of the trees were starting to turn color, because the pasture north of the driveway had been mowed.
You can barely make out the outline of our arena space, over by the driveway, not where we were originally thinking it might fit. Also, for now we have settled on one round pen, instead of two. When we were thinking about the essential horse infrastructure back then, we had yet to decide where the labyrinth would end up.
I think the labyrinth is in the perfect location. Can you find it?
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Past Views
On Sunday, we are hosting a neighborhood gathering for a cookie social. I was thinking ahead about a way I might match the people we hope will come, with the locations of their homes. I looked at property records online for an overhead view with the house numbers shown. I was considering the possibility of printing it out and having people sign in and mark their location on the map.
Unfortunately, that view, sized for a normal printer, ended up being too small to be much good. I may simply resort to having my computer there with the view that can be zoomed in and out. People could point at their homes on the screen.
While I was looking at the county map, I realized that it is a little different than the Google Earth view with which I am more familiar. I’m pretty sure the county image is older. It occurred to me that I should capture and save both for a historical reference.
Above is the view from the county property records site. Below is the view from Google Earth. It hasn’t changed since we started looking at it in 2012.
I did a search to see if I could learn how often the Google view gets updated. They claim to do so about every 3 years. We are due. I don’t know if that means they will soon post a current view, or that soon they will update it with a view from some time in the recent past.
It won’t be too hard for me to identify if a new view is from a time after we took possession, since we made a wide variety of frequent changes over the last 3 years. I’m particularly interested to see what the labyrinth looks like from space.
I’m also hoping it will be from a time when the horses were out in one of the fields. It would be really nice if that worked out.
As long as I was at it, I ventured over to a view of the old neighborhood in Eden Prairie where my family lived when I was a tween/teenager. I’ll post it here for my brothers and sisters to see. It is recognizable, despite a few changes. The road at the end of our driveway was a 2-lane back in the day, and crossing it led to a farm field, not another neighborhood.
I wonder if there are any photos of this view from back in the 1970s, maybe taken from one of the small planes out of Flying Cloud Airport.
That’s a past view I would particularly appreciate seeing.
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Relative Something 