A collection of atlases of high quality aerial photography that features selected venues from the American landscape. Central Washington, DC incorporates an area 5.68 miles north-south and 5.08 miles east-west, or some 28.84 square miles, in Washington, DC, and Arlington County, Virginia. The aerial photography reproduced in this atlas was taken in 2002 by the US Geological Survey. The atlas includes 35 pages of photographs presented at a scale of 1:7000, each titled with the name of a prominent neighborhood or landscape feature located on the page. A grid divides each of these 35 images into 72 cells; each cell measures 0.1 mile on a side and is uniquely identifiable by a letter and number located on the left and bottom side of the grid, respectively. The atlas concludes with nine pages of indexes, of which four pages are devoted to street names and five pages to selected other place names. Place names, other than streets, included in this atlas are representative of categories of places that appear on the images. Generally, the places listed include those of historical, cultural, and natural significance; international, national, state, district, and local government properties; educational institutions; and more prominent hospitals, hotels and motels, and religious sites.

Dr. Naphtali David Rishe received an M.S. in computer science at the Israel Institute of Technology in 1981, and his Ph.D. in computer science at Tel Aviv University in 1984. Since 1987, Rishe has been a professor at the School of Computer Science and founder/director of the High Performance Database Research Center at the Florida International University in Miami. Prior to this, he served as visiting professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara in the Computer Science Department.Dr. Rishe's expertise is in database management and the Internet. His current research focuses on efficiency and flexibility of database systems (particularly of object-oriented, semantic, design-support, and spatial/geographic DBMS) distributed DBMS, high-performance systems, database design tools, and Internet access to databases.Rishe is the author of two books on database design; editor of four books on database management and high performance computing; holder of four US patents on database querying, semantic database performance, Internet data extraction, and computer medicine; and author of over 200 papers in journals and proceedings on databases, software engineering, Geographic Information Systems, Internet, and life science.Additionally, he maintains the website TerraFly.com, which presents aerial views. Popularity with this website has inspired him to create the TerraAtlas series