My wife and I are shopping for real estate to move us a little closer to my new job. We have a piece of property that we have fallen in love with that has the option to buy any part of an additional 40 acres. We definitely want to buy a chunk of that land and have been pondering a way to figure exactly where around the initial 2.5 acres we want to lay claim to our additional 8. Turns out that “Google maps”:http://www.google.com/maps can help us in this respect. My wife got curious this morning and managed to locate the plot we want on Google’s satellite imaging. Suddenly, we have a bird’s-eye view of the 2.5 acres and the 40 around it. We’ll be spending some time this evening figuring out from the satellite images what shape we want our new property to take and from where to carve our land (provided everything goes smoothly with the house inspection).

Think anyone realized 20 years ago that great big cameras up in the sky would prove to be valuable assets in shopping for real estate?