I lived in Fort Collins, Colorado for over 20 years, so that's why this is such a seemingly random choice of cities. The image was downloaded from Microsoft's TerraServer USA site. The site contains 3.3 terabytes of aerial photos and topographical data for the United States down to 1m-per-pixel resolution. This particular photo was taken on October 4th, 1999.

The image browser on the site loads images in 200×200-pixel JPEG chunks. Saving large areas of the map is pretty much impossible in any conventional way, so, naturally, an unconventional way was required.

The URLs of the image tiles contain x and y coordinates. While I didn't know how to equate these coordinate units with real-world latitude and longitude, I knew I could just browse to the upper-left and lower-right corners of the city and simply write a script to download all the images in between.

The next step was piecing them all together. Unfortunately, there were 7,905 individual images, so doing this manually in Photoshop was sort of out of the question. Instead, I did a batch conversion of all the images into simple .raw format images (nothing but pixel data) and wrote a program to do all the dirty work. The resulting .raw image was brought back into Photoshop and saved as a giant TIFF image 18,600×17,000 pixels (316 megapixels). Since the souce images were JPEGs the result is not pixel perfect, however many details are easily visible.

While this image is probably chiefly of interest to people from this town, it's also interesting in a general sense. It's fun looking down on cityscape features. You can often see individual cars, and houses are easily visible. Here are some interesting parts of the photo.

	If Fort Collins is known for nothing else, we have a huge Budweiser brewery on the outskirts of town. (half resolution)
	...however, most of the people I know would rather drink a New Belgium beer any day over a Bud. Sunshine Wheat is my favorite, although a Fat Tire is good from time to time. This is the New Belgium brewery just north of Old Town. I wish they would hire me.
	A cloverleaf intersection on I-25. I think it's intersecting Mulberry.
	The Colorado State University campus, where I went to school for eleventy-billion years. The oval in the upper-right corner is known, oddly enough, as The Oval. (one-third resolution)
	Hughes Stadium, where I'm led to understand some CSU students play a sport known as "foot-ball."
	Immediately west of the stadium is the big 'A.' The 'A' stands for "Aggies," the previous mascot of Colorado State University before they became the Rams. This A is repainted every year on the hillside.
	The Colorado State University running track, right across the main drag from the old Fort Collins high school and its running track. The high school closed immediately after I graduated in 1995. They realized they would never be able to produce another student as good and decided to end it. (Actually, they built a new facility.)
	This is the new, uglier Fort Collins High School, or as I call it, Fort Collins Int'l Airport. It's a monolithic structure a quarter mile long.
	This is the little mall homies' turf, the Foothill Fashion Miz-all. Awful lot of dorky little 13-year-old white ganstaz hang out here. Usually in front of Chic-Fil-A.
	A suburban housing development abutting a trailer park. I actually used to live in one of the houses in this picture. I won't tell which.