This month, a company called DigitalGlobe launched what was billed as the world’s sharpest commercial Earth-imaging satellite. Called WorldView-3, the $500 million gadget can snap images of the ground at a 30-centimeter resolution. That’s sharp enough to see “not only a car, but the windshield and the direction the car is going,” the company boasted in a press release—as well as home plate on a baseball diamond, or the health of agricultural crops or even individual trees.

In fact, it’s so sharp that the company isn’t allowed to show the satellite’s full-resolution images to the public yet. The U.S. government recently eased its restrictions on high-resolution commercial satellite imagery, but the change won’t take full effect until February 2015. Still, the 40-centimeter versions you’ll see below rank among the sharpest yet seen by non-classified eyes.

First, here’s a gif of the WorldView-3 satellite’s Aug. 13 launch, as viewed by one of the company’s other satellites: Courtesy of DigitalGlobe

And here is a Web-optimized version of one the first images DigitalGlobe has released since the launch. It shows the Madrid Airport in Spain along with the surrounding neighborhood:

Courtesy of DigitalGlobe



Here's a zoomed-in view of the airport, taken from the full image above:

Courtesy of DigitalGlobe

Ditto for some of the nearby homes:

Courtesy of DigitalGlobe



And here's an ever closer crop on an individual swimming pool at what appears to be a little water park:

Courtesy of DigitalGlobe



You can read DigitalGlobe’s blog post about the new images and view full-resolution versions here.

Why does high-resolution commercial satellite imagery matter? As I explained when Google bought SkyBox, a rival Earth-imaging startup, its immediate applications range from mapping to corporate logistics to academic research, but there may be long-term uses that no one has yet foreseen.