I'm looking for high-resolution (1 meter or better) color satellite or
aerial imagery of the earth.  The images should be orthorectified,
stitched, and georeferenced.  I'm particularly interested in the west
coast of the USA, but world-wide imagery is of interest.  Free
high-resolution color data of a limited area (for example, a single
city) is of some interest, but the larger the area covered the happier
I'll be.

I want to be able to retrieve this data in some useful format (JPEG,
TIFF, etc.) and store it locally so that I can experiment with it. 
The data is for personal, non-commercial use and I can't afford to pay
much, if anything, for it.  A service that charged a few 10s of
dollars per GB could be okay.

A good reference for the data I want is Microsoft's Terraserver --
http://terraserver.microsoft.com -- the images are orthorectified,
stitched and georeferenced, and they're freely available.  The
downside is the images are all black and white, and the best
resolution is 1m.

Here's an example of the quality of data I'd ideally like:
http://huron.damap.com/sampleiws/nassau.htm
This data has been corrected I think (note that the map overlay is
well-aligned), unfortunately the images are in a proprietary format
and not free.

Services like Keyhole's Earthviewer http://www.earthviewer.com/ are
not what I'm looking for -- the data lives on the remote server in
that case and I am constrained to look at it using their application.

Good morning,

I certainly am not an expert in this field, but I live near
DigitalGlobe: a company that specializes in satellite photography.
They own a satellite which they are using to build an image archive of
the earth's surface. The archive can be browsed at their website:
http://www.digitalglobe.com/

It does cost some money to purchase high-resolution images, but
browsing is free.

I hope this might be of interest.

Regards,
Michael Liedtke

You want the earth to 1 meter resolution locally on your computer?????

You haven't thought this out. Look, the earth's radius is about
8,000 miles or about 13,000,000 meters. Remembering area = 4*pi*r^2,
that's 4*3.14159*(13,000,000^2) = 2058872422400000 square meters!

Assuming each map is 1,000 by 1,000 pixels, with each pixel representing
a square meter, divide:

(2058872422400000 m^2) / (((1 pixel)/m^2) * 1000000pixels/map)

...equals 2,058,872,422.4 maps to cover the earth. If each map is
merely 8 bits of color per pixel, that's a megabyte per map. And
you need 2 billion maps. Over a thousand terabytes of data.

You don't want what you think you want...at least not without
wishing for disk drives 10,000 times bigger than today's but
at the same cost.

Without even calculating, it's obvious that even "the west coast"
is still too big.

I admit it'd be fun to have such a thing to play with, though!

Compression is a wonderful thing.  According to Microsoft, their
Terraserver database is about 4TB, which is actually not all that big.
 That combined with the fact that I want high-resolution data for
random parts of the world (places I've been, places I'm going, places
I'm curious about) and not the entire part of the world and it becomes
quite a manageable amount.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) sells digital
representations of aerial images
that the government agency has taken over the years.  These images can
be ordered direct
from the website:

http://mapping.usgs.gov/digitalbackyard/doqs.html

Compression is indeed wonderful, but I still see a problem; how do
you expect to obtain the data locally? Download? On CDROM?
Even delivered to you on DVD, you wouldn't be able to get
more than a tiny fraction of 4 terabytes at any reasonable cost.

Would you be happy receiving 10% the data on 100 DVDs???

Well, okay, if so, you should start thinking about which 10% to specify.
Maybe the western states happen to constitute about 10%.

And how much your upper limit on costs happens to be. And how
long it would take to fool with 100 DVDs of data. Way back when
I despised the need to deal with zillions of floppies, but maybe you're
unusually patient. And have many hard drives.

Wild-eyed...  I don't know what fraction of the earth is ocean,
although I am sure you can find the answer on GoogleAnswers too. But I
doubt Stigmattic needs too much topographic ocean data, so that cuts
out a large chunk straightaway.

He probably doesn't even need for most continents.

Try not to take things so literally in the future.

Try MAPMART (http://www.mapmart.com) . They now have some very high (1
Foot resolution) imagery of selected cities in US. They have other
imagery also which can be of interest to you.

Regards,

Utkal Sharma