Google's Earth and Maps have had an update that "virtually eliminates clouds" for most of the world.
Some of the new images of the Earth also have a much better resolution than before, to bring regions like Russia, Indonesia and central Africa up to date for the first time in a while.
It builds on the Planetary Time Machine that Google launched last month, which offered a quick way of seeing the changes in certain regions of the planet over the last 29 years using images from Nasa's Landsat 7 satellite.
Google Earth Engine tech lead Matt Hancher said: "In 2002 Nasa released the Blue Marble, a global image of the earth with a resolution of one kilometre per pixel, based on data from Nasa's MODIS instrument.
Updated in 2005 to twice the resolution, it has remained the canonical globally-uniform picture of the earth for over a decade."
Inspired by this, the Google team took hundreds of terabytes of data from its own satellites and Landsat 7, combining them together to get rid of all those pesky clouds. "The result is a seamless, globally-consistent image of the entire planet with a resolution of 15 metres per pixel, far finer than is possible with MODIS data alone."
You can take a look at the difference on the Google blog. It's still not perfect, of course -- Landsat 7 has a weird bug that means it can only take pictures covered in black stripes that must be carefully edited out -- but it's nice to finally be able to see the full landscape of our home world without any obstacles in the way.
The next major improvements are expected to come after Landsat 8 launches later this year.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
