[Talk-ca] USGS Orthos in Canada

[Stewart C. Russell]

While editing near Leamington ON in Potlatch, I clicked by accident on
the Background -> "OSM US USGS Large Scale Aerial Imagery". It came up
with really sharp and recent orthoimagery. It's of similar quality to
the SWOOP images I buy at $50/km^2 for work, and covers some areas that
Bing doesn't. Images look to be from 2010 or so, guessing from the
visible wind power projects in SW Ontario.

Trying out several areas near the US border I found:
* that coverage is seemingly random; some isolated areas have it,
contiguous areas near the border might not
* it's coming from a very slow server which only works if you're zoomed
in very close
* it's not seemingly available from a public WMS, as any of the USGS
servers I tried blank at the Canadian border.

Surprisingly, it seems that not all USGS imagery is public domain
(https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/USGS_High_Resolution_Orthoimagery#Data_License).
So, can we use it?

cheers,
 Stewart