Yep- waaaay too much spare time.
But it does demonstrate the excellent resolution those satellite photos offer- you can see individual tiles on the buildings and I believe they can read numberplates.
Well, the resolution on the nearmap.com pics we get is not good enough to read number plates, but you can zoom-in further:
This shows the vehicle below the starboard wing in earlier pics.
My place of work pays a license fee in the order of $200K per year to use these pics. Some of the features and applications are really handy / valuable. The aerial pics are currently updated to April 2016 and at least 55 (with relevant dates) going back to 2009 in some suburbs in the municipality I work in / for. This feature is particularly good for us trying to find out who has been doing what, and then checking if a permit has been issued.
Or (as in my case) when a resident claims Council had put a light pole in the middle of his nature strip, right where he wanted to put in his driveway. He would not take "no we didn't", got his five minutes on a current affairs program, but didn't apologise when we showed a series of pics with light pole in place for three years before he purchased his block.
These pics and series of pic, as well as Google aerials and Streetview, often allow an issue (read complaint) raised by a customer to be assessed / investigated from the desktop, rather than driving 30 minutes to and 30 minutes from a site.
Time is money, even for Local Government and public servants.
NearMap has good / frequent coverage of capital cities, larger metropolitan areas, and many provincial towns and cities, but does not cover rural areas very well.
