Too late to catch the Sydney Games from Olympic ringside seats?

Flying Over Down Under

Downtown Sydney and the Olympic Village are all revealed in sharp 1-meter detail in these orbital photos. See if you can spot the Sydney Opera House -- or the Russian Buran space shuttle!

Thanks to the sharpshooting camera on Space Imaging Inc.’s IKONOS satellite, SPACE.com is featuring an interactive view of the 27th Olympiad from in orbit.

Using Xippix ImagePump Viewer technology, the feature allows viewers to bob and weave like a true pugilist, using high-resolution satellite images to zoom in and out over the entire Olympic village.

The IKONOS satellite, fast approaching its first anniversary in orbit, uses its 3-foot (1-meter) resolution camera to create detailed images bested - by a nose at most - only by government spy satellites.

The satellite zips around Earth at a 4-mile (6.4-kilometer) -a-second clip that would put even speedster Marion Jones to shame. And it does so from an altitude equivalent to the length of 16 full marathons.

Although the images won’t reveal glimpses of your favorite athletes - they were snapped back in July - you can use them to peer down on all the games’ venues, including Olympic Stadium, where Australian dynamo Cathy Freeman put torch to cauldron during Friday’s opening ceremony.

By 2003, nearly a dozen companies in five countries will have high-resolution, remote-sensing cameras in orbit that are of spy-satellite quality, experts predict.