Posts Tagged ‘satellite view’
Aerial History
With much appreciation to my son, Julian, for his pointer to a precious University of Minnesota online historical aerial photograph resource he stumbled onto yesterday, I dedicate today’s post to my siblings and cousins who will most likely enjoy this more than anyone else.
I immediately searched for images from my old Eden Prairie homes. I started looking at our house on Cedar Ridge Road, but the big fun was exploring views of Intervale Ranch on old County Road 18.
Check out the place in 1960:
I have cropped this to include Fullerton’s and McCartney’s houses for reference, and the gravel pit across from the driveway of our house.
You can clearly see the center circle of our driveway, the tennis court, the barns, and the house on the hill that was the Superintendent’s quarters where the family first lived while our grandparents were in the main house.
Just seven years later, it looked like this:
Look how much bigger the gravel pit is. You can see the divided highway that formed the barrier between us and Braemar Park. I’m pretty certain that the final excavation of the surroundings was already underway, based on the pathway cleared between the outer barn and the highway.
Here is a closer zoom focusing on Intervale:
Can you find the chestnut tree?
And finally, here is a wider pan to show more of the surroundings:
This gives the added reference of 494 in the bottom of the frame, much of the golf course, and –with the stark white roof– the Braemar hockey rink.
You can also see the rest of the expanded gravel pit.
Remember how hilly it was around there? From the satellite view, it is really hard to get a sense of those dramatic features. I believe we have photos of the construction of the north/south divided highway that was County 18 at the time that are dated 1962. I find it interesting to consider the changes that happened in the seven years between these images.
Cyndie and I have been at Wintervale for seven years now. In October it will reach eight. Luckily, I’ve already been collecting the overhead satellite views of this property.
Hopefully, there won’t be any divided highway installations coming into the pictures in our lifetimes.
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Updated View
The satellite view I reference most often was finally updated to show our property after all our renovations. Back in early July, I posted about my surprise finding that the satellite view available on Apple devices was updated to 2015. I recently discovered that the view on Google maps has been updated to show our property as of this spring, 2016.
We are able to see the wild flower garden that Cyndie had started and the T-post fence we put up to sub-divide the back pasture, both of which happened in April. The trees look fully leafed out and I had obviously mowed the lawn, but the farm fields look bare.
I found particular pleasure in noticing that all 4 horses were again in view. This time they are somewhat evenly spread, grazing around the perimeter of the round pen.
We found one object that we haven’t been able to identify in the yard. The resolution stops just short of providing the necessary definition. If it were a different color, I’d guess it might be me mowing the lawn.
I may need to review my posts from that timeframe to see if there is anything that triggers a memory about something we had been up to in that spot.
I love having this overhead view to refer to. If satellite images weren’t available on the internet, I just might be inspired to get a drone, so I could take my own shots and have some control over when and how often they are done.
I’ll be interested to see how long this view is active on Google. Now that I have a good reference point, the next update will clearly reveal the duration between updates of this region.
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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 