
I've been waiting for this for a good while: sometime in the past few weeks, Google Maps updated
its satellite images of Near Southeast, after having been stuck in 2004 time-range for a long time. It's now a shot from sometime in Spring of 2008 (May or late April, to judge by the work on the hole at
1015 Half Street and the leafy-ness of the trees at the ballpark), and, lo and behold, there's that
Nationals Park, all shiny and new.
There's been other free online satellite images that were more recent than Google's, but the newest I had seen was this
Mapquest shot from late 2006, where the steel work was underway at the ballpark. So this is quite a Great Leap Forward, not only because it shows the completed ballpark, but comparing the two images (as
you can do on my Satellite Compare page) shows the incredible amount of change during that 18-month timespan in the neighborhood. (You can also compare this newest images to others from 1988, 2002, 2004, and 2005; my preference is to
compare it to 2002.)