okay, went back to the same us city and switched to the usgs sat images - now THAT's detail!
jack shit for images of where i live though.
the usgs images are cutoff, as expected, along the canadian border. but what strikes me as slightly odd is the level of detail that's available for anyone to download & view - including pretty much *exact* coordinates.
ie, since i've been there many times - i know which buildings i'm looking at, i can pick out two border crossings between bc (canada) & washington state (usa), including a commercial truck crossing. (kind of hard to miss with a lineup of semi trailers in queue!)
you'd think making this good of a map available to anyone on the planet might be a security concern. but then again, that's only in *todays* world o' fear - and only a concern re: ppl that would actually do something crazy, in which case those people would locate whatever they wanted to locate anyways. hrmmm
now if only the whole world was as detailed as the usgs sat images!