Images from Maps: Kennedy Space Center #NASATweetup

One of the more fun types of data is image data, both meta data and actual images.  So I turned to Google Maps and Bing Maps to see what various sites at the Kennedy Space Center looked like. Here’s a launch pad from Google Maps.  You can see the boosters there.

Then there’s this image of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB).  At first I was confused why part of this area was blackened out, until I realized the dark area is the shadow from the VAB.

You would probably recognize this building better from these NASA Photos:

And Bing’s Birdseye view of the launch pad, VAB, and viewing area:

The first visualization I saw  of the VAB area caused my brain to jump to: "wow, they’ve blacked out some of the Space Center" when all that was going on was a perfectly natural occurrence of sunlight and shadow.  I find it interesting that that different views of the same locations (via two different data services, Google and Bing) gives me a different understanding of the same places.  There seems to be a lesson there in displaying the same data in many different ways.

2 Comments

• 
  Rachel 31 March 2011 at 2:15 PM

  This is fantastic! Can I repost this to my Tweetup Blog?

  Reply
  • 
    Karen Lopez 31 March 2011 at 2:58 PM

    Sure, with attribution, of course.

    Reply

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