This Tuesday, if the sky is clear over Washington, the world will see a detailed color image of the throngs attending the Inauguration of Barack Obama. GeoEye, the Virginia-based satellite company which owns the new satellite, has an exclusive arrangement with Google Earth to provide quality satellite images.(There is no relationship with Google and this Inauguration project.)
On Tuesday afternoon, the company will provide the image to the international news media and provide the image as a free, high-res download on its site.
CNN plans to use the image in the big Microsoft Photosynth project described in RWW.
The company says the new satellite provides "the highest resolution color images on the market."
Above is an image of the Capitol taken on December 29. Tuesday's photo will be from a similar angle. It is scheduled to be taken at 11:19 a.m. EST as the satellite passes over the city. However, a check of the weather for Tuesday calls for "mostly cloudy." We shall see.
MG Siegler at Venture Beat wrote about this last night.
Here is a company animation of the September 6 launch and its image gathering process.
1/20 Update: The images are live and can be seen on Venture Beat.
— Andy Plesser, Executive Producer
Disclaimer: GeoEye is public relations client of Plesser Holland
