Navigating with Google Earth

[dstraton]

I wonder if anyone has discovered a slick, professional and robust system of navigating using satellite imagery, such as found on Google Earth or Bing?

I looked into it a few years ago, and wrote a blog article; Navigating in the Pacific around coral

I find the OpenCPN system pretty clunky, and wondered if some competent tech company had found a way to integrate satellite imagery with a dedicated chart-plotter?

[requiem]

Supposedly Garmin offers satellite imagery for plotters with Navionics Vision+ subscription and downloading via ActiveCaptain, but I haven't played with it myself.

I'm glad I decided to read your link first, before posting that many have published instructions here for creating "charts from satellite". Since I don't want to fiddle with the DIY route, I just use the right-click "download satellite chart" option in SEAiq. Toss a coin to your witcherVenture...

One other thing you mentioned worth calling out is that the purple "fog of war" Google applies should be considered exactly that: unsurveyed, rather than empty water. As for the "various solutions" you also listed, to me those are all things the prudent navigator should be doing anyway.

[ItDepends]

Most of the e-chart suppliers have satellite overlays, so there really isn’t anything new to add.

There is so much more to navigating than not running into land, this seems about a 3rd tier tool—at best

[Franziska]

You can fairly easily extract the very latest Google or Bing zoomable sat imagery of a coastline with SASplanet. Usually zoom levels from 15-19 are sufficient. Than export them as geo referenced MBtiles and create a chart group with them.
Now you can easily switch to them with a simple right-click in OpenCPN.

Sat images have their place contributing further info besides the nav charts.
You can easily spot the character of a coast line, you can often see the type of ground in an anchorage and more.

The nav chart is for navigation, but the Sat images augment that wonderfully.