Satellite maps?

[fizolas]

Hi Artem,

Yet another suggestion: virtualearth.net, now owned by Bing/Microsoft provides map tiles for satellite imagery (which is currently not available on S60Maps). Maybe these could be incorporated to the current list of maps?

Some information on accessing virtualearth.net tiles:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bingmaps/rest-services/directly-accessing-the-bing-maps-tiles
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bingmaps/articles/bing-maps-tile-system

[artem78]

virtualearth.net

It redirects to Bing maps for me.

[fizolas]

The queries for tiles are as follows. The meaning of the four numbers 0,1,2,3 are 0 (NW),1 (NE), 2 (SW), 4 (SE). For example, if you start at the highest level (i.e. the world):

http://h0.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/h0.jpeg?g=1 -> North America, Greenland
http://h0.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/h1.jpeg?g=1 -> Europe and Asia, part of Africa
http://h0.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/h2.jpeg?g=1 -> South America, Antarctica
http://h0.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/h3.jpeg?g=1 -> part of Africa, Australia, Antarctica

Say you want to zoom in one of these areas: then you just append 0,1,2,3 depending on the direction to one of the previous cases. For example, to zoom in on Australia, you append "1" (NE) to 3:

http://h0.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/h31.jpeg?g=1 -> Australia

To zoom in on the west of Australia you go NW in the previous map:

http://h0.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/h310.jpeg?g=1 -> West of Australia

I think there are 19 or 20 depth levels, depending on the part of the Earth. For example: depth 19

http://h0.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/h3101110000000333100.jpeg?g=1

[fizolas]

By the way, the strategy above is called QuadTiles or hierarchical binning (you probably knew about this already, but just in case...)

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/QuadTiles