Tech Behind Live Earth

Some of the 3d views in Live Earth are stunning (especially if you live in a major US city).    Mark Brown talks about the camera technology that sits behind it.  Very cool.

http://blogs.msdn.com/markbrown/archive/2008/05/23/cnet-article-on-google-capturing-3d-data.aspx

A bit about the cameral

216 mega-pixels with a panchromatic image size of 14,430 x 9,420 pixels, capturing data at over 3 GBits/sec, 13 CCD's - 7 pan and 4 color (RGB + Near IR) and 14 CPU's to process the raw images and data in real-time. The data units for the camera hold 1.7TB, enough for about 4,700 images

How the heck can I get me one of those 216 Mega-pixel cameras?  I'm sure in 15 years Canon will come out with a consumer model ;-)